Recently, the new school in Elliston has sent out a call for new names, and someone has proposed renaming Orange Avenue to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d like to put out a call for another name change: the "smart" road.

Upon moving to the New River valley a year ago, the name struck me as a cruel irony, for how can a road be "smart"? Yes, it will make lives easier for some by providing a more direct route between Blacksburg and Roanoke, so maybe it should be called the "easy" road, but so far there’s been nothing easy (or cheap) about building it. Of course, it will not make lives easy on the non-human species who will lose their habitat.

Some have proposed naming the "smart" road after Martin Luther King, Jr. to solve two problems, but that would dishonor a truly "smart" and intelligent human being. Many places have streets named after King, but such streets are usually in the cities and towns, not on roads that pull communities out into sprawling (mostly white) corridors. King was called unrealistic for his approach to civil rights, as are many who oppose "progress" or "development," two other misnomers.

Pathways for Radford is also seeking names, for the trail to run along the New River. I have one for them: the "smarter road." I suggest they take on the name for the new road to connect not two commercial centers but two community centers or "parks," Bisset and the Dedmon Center. For there truly is something smarter about such a road, built by a local, grassroots, citizens group and not engineers, bureaucrats and business leaders. The Ellet Valley "smart" road will showcase transportation technologies, including, I am told, snow making equipment. The New River Valley "smart" road will also showcase important technologies, in bicycles, and in understanding where we are. There will be signs along this "smart" road

that tell about the cultural history of the area, including Native American sites, and about the flora and fauna to be found there. These are not the signs that we read as we drive rapidly by them, insulated from the world outside, but ones we will read on a bike or on foot, with time to contemplate and experience what they refer to. There will be signs that tell us, in effect, that we are entering an important biogregion and watershed, not the "green" signs that tell us we are "Entering Virginia's Technology Corridor." Knowing where we are, and what has happened there, and what lives there—this is "smart."

The "smart" road will cost 32.7 million dollars; the "smarter" road, .7 million.

Henry David Thoreau wrote in "Walking" that it is not knowledge we should seek but sympathy with intelligence, not rational "smarts" but understanding with feeling. He was calling for a new way of thinking, an un-thinking that would not separate but include us in what surrounds us, the environs (from the French, to circle). Aldo Leopold would later call it the land ethic.

Last weekend I participated with Pathways in the cleanup of what used to be the town dump at river’s edge and in the middle of the proposed route. This dump site, I hope, is also recorded in the path’s signage so we don’t forget past uses of the river bank. Do any of us think there is something "smart" about the way we dam and dump rivers, blow the tops off of mountains in West Virginia, or drop bombs on Serbia, though technologies have enabled us to do so. "Smart bombs" is at least as oxymoronic as the classic "military intelligence" or our "smart road."

In making things "easier" for us we have often sapped the very life and wildness that sustains us. While I am dependent on many kinds of the technologies our ingenuity as a species has concocted, I am also concerned at what seems to be a crisis of the imagination, or at least of metaphor. How can we assign "smartness" to our roads, bombs and computers? If trees or valleys were "smart," it would be harder to pave our way through them. Biologists, after all, tell us that nature is an ecosystem more complex than any a human mind could devise.

I have heard there is a woman making a documentary film about a road in Hawaii that is being built but seems ill- fated. Construction workers have reported strange accidents, tools missing, a bright light at the end of a new tunnel and machines that move by themselves overnight. With the change orders, the doubling in price (on the first phase alone!) and the unfortunate accidents, one wonders if a similar "spirit"—or should I say "intelligence"—guards the Ellet Valley. Many fear the Y2K phenomenon, but maybe there is some solace in time getting back at our so-called smart machines.