At the preteen camp where I have served as staff both this year and last year, there is a spot labeled as the crossroads, where the road that goes from the classrooms by the dining hall and towards the boys’ and men’s cabin meets another road that goes from near the campfire by the gym and dining hall towards the girls’ and women’s cabins.  This crossroads is a place where people retrieve lost belongings that someone else found, or where people meet and chat who are coming from different directions.  This morning, as I write this, for example, I saw someone else taking a photo of a beautiful morning fog lifting from the pond at the crossroads when I was hobbling in, as my gout flared up yesterday in my left foot and has made walking both slow and painful, and I chatted with them a bit before heading off to drink some water and sit down at the dining hall/gym area.

In the music of Robert Johnson, great blues guitarist of the early 20^th century, and in myth and lore within European civilization as a whole, the crossroads has always played a distinctly mysterious role.  Robert Johnson, an early (and perhaps founding) member of the 27 club, claimed to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.  The infernal trade of souls for special privileges and favors from the demonic world has long been said to have occurred at the crossroads.  The more rationalistic side of me tends to think of that sort of dark view as reflecting a rather pessimistic view of trade and commerce, and assuming that locations where trade and commerce take place are also places where one can engage in trade of a different sort.  One wonders whether any heavenly sort of commerce was imagined here or whether trading and shipping have always been viewed in more pessimistic ways. 

After all, it is the convenience of the crossroads as a location for trade that has made it important throughout history.  Roads and trails and paths going from one place to another have long existed because of the needs of people to obtain resources from far-off places that were not available close to home, and to engage in trade of either raw materials or finished products to pay for what one needed to obtain that were of interest to others.  This is easy enough to understand, but when multiple such routes converge on the same locations, the opportunities for trade are expanded still further, and such crossroads can serve as the land equivalents of the ports that have always greatly facilitated trade and communication and movement.  Internal development has tended to encourage the growth of crossroads and local hubs, while external development focuses on the ports that bring goods from across the seas and take one’s products to those lands to pay off the bill for the products that are brought in from afar.  Exchange has always been necessary, and the easier such exchange can take place, the better off everyone can be.

Still, whether the crossroads are viewed as being obvious logistical points where communication and exchange can take place or whether people conceive of trading and shipping in darker terms—in the traffic of men’s bodies and souls—such places have long been important for humanity and can expect to remain important as long as people need things that they cannot provide for themselves, which is to say, as long as we remain human and civilized at all.  One does not need writing to need trade, and even where one’s needs and wants are simple, one still wants things that are beyond one’s ability to obtain for oneself.  And where one wants things that one cannot make for oneself but which are nevertheless available because of the behavior of merchant middlemen, one will have to meet them at the crossroads where such trade can be done.