Roads and Banks

The Yukon is beautiful.  Raw, real, still largely untouched. It’s a land rich in natural resources and resourceful people. I rode a motorcycle across the province a while back.  Driving across Western Canada is like riding the historical timelines we drew in school as children. 

We rode through the pre-historic period, slowly working our way around animals the size of trucks. 

We rode through the war period, stopping at ‘Mile 0' built by the US & Canadian governments in WWII to supply the western front of Alaska with munitions as points of Alaska are only 60 miles from Russia.

We rode through the boom period, literally riding on roads built to transport oil and the men that support, supply and repair the process of fueling our SUVs.

We rode through the bust period, staying in hotels that once relied on ‘49ers’ hoping for gold, now relying on busloads of cruise excursions.

We rode through the modern period, passing skyscrapers and ‘hungry. anything helps’ signs. 

Over a cup of thick coffee and a slice of bumbleberry pie, we spoke of the roads and those vehicles that rode on them.  

Nearer town, we saw the sports cars of the affluent, heading out to the lodge for the weekend.  Electric vehicles were replaced with RVs of the weekender type, shifting quickly toward the cross-country type, adorned with a different set of stickers and type of bug.  Eventually, those were replaced with service trucks, taking men (and very few women) to the front lines of oil and mineral extraction.  Along the way, we saw tour buses and ferries as well as official vehicles like Border Patrol and Native Police.

‘Roads exist because there’s money at one end and a bank at the other’ noted the native.  Seemed oversimplified honestly, but most wisdom does at first glance.  Roads were built to protect the front lines (who were protecting our money) or to take the gold found in the ground to the bank where it could be turned into whiskey and a mortgage.  A map of the tundra is clean even if limited, while the map of my route to work from the suburbs to downtown, looks like a plate of spaghetti.  More money. More banks. 

Our brains work the same way: neural routes are formed because there’s a stimulus at one end and a payoff at the other.  

I do wonder if, like some of the roads in the tundra, we wear out certain routes and lose our flexibility, trading presence for payoff.  I’ve watched that with even a day a week away from my phone or computer, my brain finds new routes and new ways ‘to the bank.’ Like the gold rush in the Yukon, the payoffs at the end of many neural pathways are empty.  

New pathways, new neural experiences are where we learn.  These pathways force us to move with intentionality and awareness because the roads are new.  We have the opportunity to create new roads, allowing old ruts to heal.