The M60: What kind of death do you fear?

The M62 was severed some time ago by a Statutory Instrument, which gave the go-ahead for the Manchester Orbital motorway to take its route and overwrite its name for the north-west splice connecting Worsley with Whitefield. Thus on one of my longest alongside-motorway routes, today, I’ve not been walking the M62 at all. I’ve been walking the M60. Anti-clockwise, Whitefield to Worsley.

I’ve been passing beneath landmark buildings: Pilkington’s Tiles near J16 Clifton Junction, St Mark’s Church Worsley overlooking J13. Discovering more abandoned roads, now given over to nature, in particular the cobblestoned Philips Park Road on the north side of the motorway near Whitefield – the opposite side to the rest of Philips Park. Discovering the messy, muddy (in the rain today) post-industrial scrubland in a triangle bounded by the motorway, the River Irwell, and a derelict Clifton – Radcliffe railway line, approaching Pilkingtons near J16 Clifton Junction. Enjoying the unanticipated beauty and industrial-heritage interest of Worsley. I’ve found paths through the cemeteries of Swinton and removed my damp baseball hat on the A6 Manchester Road as a funeral cortege passed by. And I’ve felt shocked by a reminder of my closeness to home: emerging from a footpath by Wardley Hall onto the A580 East Lancs Road… the road near which, some twenty-or-so miles westwards, is my home.

On a day when to get the map out too often would risk it becoming quickly void by rain damage, it’s still easy to keep your bearings when you’re trying to follow the motorway. You use your ears; the thrum and throb of hundreds of powerful engines thundering around the six-lane circuit of Manchester – it’s loud and it’s constant and, if you want to use that road as a guide to your peregrinations through the northern outlands of this great city then all you need do is stay close to the noise it makes. Probably the loudest and most exposed part of the journey was on the footbridge where Philips Park Road ends and the westbound traffic nears Junction 16. Whenever a cluster of articulated lorries passed beneath this not-too-high bridge over a fast and busy stretch of road, their high sides sending all sorts of currents eddying violently through the air, the bridge shook.

I was safe up there, of course, as safe as the hundreds of people per minute flashing past beneath, seemingly unaware of how vulnerable they all look to mortal error at such massively high speeds. It got me thinking, my mediation at Junction 16, What kind of death do you fear?

What kind of death do you fear?
A plummeting death, falling helpless to a messy tarmacked end?
A heart-attack death, the shocks of life – absorbed successfully for so long – suddenly taking you out?
A death by terrifying collision?

What kind of death do you fear?
Perhaps a death by stasis – a gradual slowing like in a motorway tailback, a perpetual helpless waiting?
Perhaps a death by motion – becoming trapped in an orbit of speed and light, unable to step off?

What kind of death do you fear?
One which exposes your weaknesses, that reveals your unfitness for the fast lane?
One which exposes your complacency, that judges your devotion to the central lane?
One which exposes your impotence, forever held in the slow lane?

A death by dangerous living?
A death by angry reaction?
A death by negligence?
A death by drifting asleep?
What kind of death do you fear?