In Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang , a motley group stands on Comb Ridge outside Blanding, looking down at "a turmoil of dust and activity. Whine of motors, snort and growl of distant diesels" -- the building of State Road 95 between Blanding and Hanksville.

The monkey wrench gang would sabotage SR-95 in their war against "the advance of Technocracy, the growth of Growth, the spread of the ideology of the cancer cells."

What was it about roads that raised Abbey's hackles? He saw them as scars on the land, routes for exploitation. Others see the same roads as engines of economic growth -- and a way to get places faster.

These polarized attitudes collided in the building of SR-95.

The road began as a pioneer route in the 19th century, evolved to a graded dirt road, and finally to the paved "Bicentennial Highway," dedicated in 1976.

At the dedication of the graded dirt road in 1946, speakers extolled it as a symbol of progress. They told the audience of rural Utahns that they were engaged in the same work as their fathers and grandfathers who had pioneered the route through wild, godforsaken country.

The new graded road was still far too slow to attract much commerce or tourism. At the dedication, Gov. Herbert Maw told the crowd that southeastern Utah would need a better road.

The first upgrade came in the early 1950s, when the Atomic Energy Commission paid to pave the stretch of road from Blanding to Natural Bridges National Monument. Whereas the old road swung north around the formidable Comb Ridge and followed the high ground near the Bear's Ears, the new road sliced through a break near the summit of the ridge and descended by a steep dugway -- all built with extensive blasting of the slickrock.

Beginning in 1964, in anticipation of Lake Powell, road crews built more sections. Unlike the old days, there could be no simple Colorado River crossing at Hite. Hite would soon lie under the upper end of Lake Powell (which Abbey called "a motionless body of murky green effluent, dead, stagnant, dull. ..."). The new highway would arc around the lake and feature three new steel-arch bridges.

In April 1975, as road crews blasted, cut, filled, graded and paved, Abbey and a friend snuck into White Canyon and poured sugar in equipment fuel tanks, causing $20,000 in damage. Later he recalled, tongue-in-cheek, that he did "quite a bit of field research" for The Monkey Wrench Gang.

But the sabotage did not stop the $23 million road project.

Abbey and others objected not to the old winding road but to the straightened, paved highway. Even to Abbey, the old rough roads used by locals for so many years had almost blended into the landscape. Not so the new pavement. There was something about the asphalt, about erasing the natural contours of the land, about the audacity of cutting through natural barriers and throwing steel bridges over slickrock canyons.

There was something about speeding by without consideration of the character of the terrain, without feeling the place.

And yet, today both people who love wilderness and people who don't use that road, getting to where they want to go -- whether to the Arch Canyon Jeep Safari or to backpack down Grand Gulch. To most people now, the experience of rushing through the landscape is the experience of place. Windows open to the desert air, or windows closed with music blaring, we wind to the top of Comb Wash and whiz down the other side. We take speed for granted.

Roads not only transform landscapes but also our perception of them. They change our relationship with the land. Was SR-95 progress or degradation? Loss or gain? Both.

Kristen Rogers-Iversen lives in Salt Lake City. kristenri@yahoo.com