There are places on the map where the road ends. It can be easy to forget that.

I drove to what you might call the end of the roads once.

Started here in New Hampshire, we drove first four hours north to Montreal.

That's where the big yellow roads, the closed access highways, the interstates. That's where those end. But then we kept going. Another seven hours

straight north to Matagami. That's where the highways built by the normal

processes of government end and a road built by a process of colonial corporate expansion began.

And then we drove another 10 hours through the low black spruce trees that fight their way up from the thin soils of the Canadian

shield to Chisassaby, a thriving Cree town at 53 degrees north latitude.

There's another road that goes east that we could have driven

along for longer but to get to the next village up the coast we would have had to have

gone by boat or plane or snowmobile. It felt like we had driven to the end of the roads.

Today I want to tell you about another place on the map where the road ends.

The agreements signed today by Secretary of Transportation Volpe, Panamanian Minister of Public Works

for Braga, and the Colombian Minister.

In English, we call it the Darien Gap. In Spanish it's called

the Tappon-Del-Darian or the Darien plug.

The Darien Gap needed to link together existing sections of the Pan American Highway System.

This is not Richard Nixon, you're hearing by the way, it's my coworker

Nickići, very convincingly reading a written statement Nixon made in 1971 about the completion of a 14,000 mile road from Alaska to the tip of South America.

The Darian Gap portion over the next several years will constitute an historic milestone

along the road to understanding and unity within our hemisphere.

The Darien has been many things to many people. In the late 1600s, Scotland of all countries made one of its attempts at colonialism by sending five ships to the Darien coast.

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