In America we love roads. To be "on the road" is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibility. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. "Riding off into the sunset" has always been our happy ending.
But I could find no happy-ending vista [on the Sibirskii Trakt], only the opposite. This had also been called the Convicts' Road or the Exiles Road. Not only was it long and lonesome, but it ran permanently in the wrong direction, from the exiles point of view. Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they'd had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here.
Using a place for punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place.
- Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia, p. 220.
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