Canoe in the City

Have you ever traveled in China by bus or car? If not, perhaps you have had a similar experience in traffic while visiting another foreign country. It can feel like all rules of the road have been thrown out the window and that you are being subjected to unreasonable risk by every driver on the road, including the driver of your own vehicle. It can leave you feeling as frazzled upon arrival, as if you had just participated in “the running of the bulls” at Pamplona.

But then on the way to the airport in Xiamen , I had a flash of insight that is helping me relax a little about the seemingly incomprehensible traffic patterns here. We had signed up for the airport shuttle from our hotel and expected a bus that would carry at least 15 to 20 people. But it turned out that we were the only guests leaving on the 10:10 shuttle. So we were treated to a ride in a fairly luxurious hotel mini-van by a driver and one other hotel employee.

Perhaps he was a particularly smooth driver or perhaps the traffic was a little on the light side, but the ride seemed safe and harmonious. I began to study the driver’s choices and the image of a stick flowing down a rocky, mountain stream came to mind. Instead of taking the lane markings as a restrictive parameter, the driver seemed only to be conscious of obstacles, potential obstacles and vacuums or potential vacuums in the “channel of the streambed.” Where obstacles appeared, he flowed around them as if the pavement itself was forced aside to slip past any obstruction. Where vacuums in the traffic were apparent, the vehicle flowed into them as if the stream itself willed it to achieve balance. When all channels forward came to a stop, the traffic backed up from bank to bank until it was so great that it overflowed the lowest point in the obstacle and traffic began to flow freely again, even a little faster in the relative vacuum beyond the temporary dam.

He did stop for traffic signals, of course, but other than that, it seemed as if the car was controlled by unseen water flowing along with us all the way to the airport. The lane markings were superfluous and had little to do with our path. And the driver never seemed to assume that he had an inalienable right to the space in the marked lane just ahead of us. If a driver from a side street inserted the front of his car into our path, our driver treated it exactly as if a boulder had rolled into the edge of the water; slowing if necessary and then flowing around it like surging water would move around the new obstacle. If a faster moving vehicle slipped past us on the left, it seemed to draw our vehicle in its wake around slower moving vehicles that had been ahead of us.

I arrived at the airport relaxed and refreshed as if we had traveled in a canoe down a mountain stream.