Review: David Alff on road ecology

Crossings confound us. Just ask Oedipus, the mythical Theban prince who unwittingly slays his father in a traffic dispute “where three roads join’d.” Sophocles wrote these words in the sixth century BC, when skittish Greeks appeased Hecate, the goddess of crossroads, by building her shrines at intersections. Premodern English parishioners were so distra…