Along the Highway (5)

I’m glad I followed amandoAlentejo’s advice and went back to Highway 101 this morning. Light conditions were dramatic. I got there just before sunrise. Heavy clouds were darkening the sky. People were hurrying to get to work before the rain. But then the rising sun broke through, creating an eerie and mesmerizing atmosphere.  

When the highway was built, Teixeira de Freitas’ city limits were still far away. During the last two decades, however, the city grew at an incredible speed and soon reached the margins of the highway. It didn’t take long, and people crossed the highway to build their houses on the empty plots they found there. Today, some 40.000 people live to the east of the highway. Most of them have jobs “on the other side”, where most of our towns businesses are located. Thousands of pedestrians, bicycles, and motorcycles cross the highway every day, while cars and trucks rush past them at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour. There are no traffic lights, no intersections where traffic on the highway must slow down. To me, it is one of those typical Brazilian mysteries: European logic says this should be a mass-grave, but since we’ve moved here almost five years ago I haven’t heard of a single fatality on this stretch of BR-101.