A Dime for Your Thoughts

The following was written during my two-month-long journey on back roads that took me from Seattle to south Texas and north to New York City in 2011.

It was August; the heat, heavy with humidity, melted the blacktop and teased the mind with steaming mirages that disappeared as the car moved toward them. Swarms of locust buzzed in a loud crescendo amid the tall, dry grass lining the roadside ditches. Cows stood belly deep in algae-laden farm ponds, passively chewing their cud, their tails flicking at flies as if the effort was hardly worth the expended energy.

I had been driving for a few hours from the gulf port of Corpus Christi, where I attended elementary school and my father served as city manager from 1953 to 1958. Corpus was the southernmost point on what would become an 11,500 mile backroad odyssey from Seattle to New York.  I was on my way to Dallas to visit my McClure cousins and their mother, the only remaining member of my parents’ generation.

The two-lane state road ran plumb straight, the traffic signs attempting to slow the few speeding cars and flatbed trucks as they passed crossroad towns so small the only apparent life was trucks and SUVs idling in front of a 7-11.  When I was young, I traveled on this same road and many others like it during vacation road trips with my parents. “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!” my mother called out as the sign announcing the next town’s name and population appeared ahead. One that I remembered from that long ago journey suddenly appeared ahead:

Dime Box

Pop. 321

Dime Box and Old Dime Box were two of the many ramshackle towns that we drove past back then as we counted down the miles to the next Stuckey’s and read aloud the Burma Shave signs planted beside the road.  The name Dime Box stuck with my mother and me for many years afterwards. We wondered where the name came from and regarded it as the quintessential small town in backcountry Texas.  

Here I was again nearly 60 years later and there it still was, squatting beside this old road that connected farming communities. I slowed down, switched on the turn signal even though there were no other cars in sight, and turned right into Dime Box on a cracked and pitted street.  Who still lived in a place like this? Why did they stay? Was it mostly inhabited by old people who were visited occasionally by their children and grandchildren? Why would anyone stay if they had the choice?  

I wasn’t the first traveler to stop in Dime Box. Author William Least Heat Moon got a haircut at the barbershop on the road trip that became his seminal book, Blue Highways, a story of discovery that had become a beacon for my own backroad explorations over the years.

I drove up and down the few intersecting streets that ended almost before they began, one or two looping back to the main road. The wood houses looked like they had been there for a century or more, vestiges of paint long gone, their porches sagging, some laden with an old sofa, a doorless refrigerator or rusting washing machine.  Pickup trucks covered in dry mud sat in front yards. A dog lay on its side under a tree, raising its head to watch as I drove slowly by.

Back on the main road, I stopped to read the Old Dime Box Historic Marker: “County's second oldest community. First known as Brown's Mills. Present name derived from practice of leaving dimes in box at Joseph S. Browne's Mill so that postman John W. Ratliff would bring items from Giddings to community members.” 

“New” Dime Box, I later learned from an internet search, was established several years later when the railroad installed a line three miles away and residents moved closer to it.

Dime Box and Old Dime Box are two of the thousands of small towns and villages, crossroads and nearly empty communities throughout America where time slows down and nothing much happens, where the lives of the people who remain are connected in ways that city dwellers will never know.

I continued north through the thickness of the summer heat past the cow pastures and corn fields of Lee County toward the knotted highways and clogged traffic arteries surrounding Dallas.