Traveling Unpaved Roads

Traveling across the U.S. on back roads seems to some to be insanity. The “what ifs” tumble from the lips of people who position themselves as merely concerned friends. Friends who want to make sure the traveler has thought through the possibilities of failure or worse. Friends who seem to be risk takers but are, in actuality, well…believers in being safe. While I can understand the hesitancy of the families and friends of those first settlers who set out across the mountains and plains, deserts and forests in covered wagons, those same warnings seem out of place in this age of paved roads and connectivity.  That said, I am pulled toward unpaved roads that disappear into the distance. Places where cellphone bars also disappear.

Group travel in a large bus is foreign to me. I have seen these behemoths whizzing by on highways or lumbering through a city, the occupants staring out the windows at the passing landscape or cityscape, a tour guide speaking into a microphone and pointing to things of supposed interest. They go home and tell their friends about their trip and what they saw. But what did they really see? Did they experience a new culture or explore a neighborhood or eat in a local restaurant like those that I enjoy every day in Washington Heights or the Lower East Side or even a small town in a remote area of China?  This is what it means to “take a journey” rather than “go on a trip.” A journey is discovery. A trip is merely getting from point A to point B the fastest way possible.

I was brought up by a mother who read the road atlas like others read Good Housekeeping. Her red-polished finger following the continent-wide spiderweb that connected farms to villages, villages to towns, towns to cities. She took special joy in finding names like Dime Box and Old Dime Box, adjacent villages in Texas, or Bug, a small town in southern Kentucky. Whooping with glee, she would announce the name and write it down as a future destination.

I took my first road trip at the age of one when my father accepted a new job in Dayton, Ohio. The year was 1948, several years before the first interstate highway was opened. It took my father three long days of driving from Wichita to arrive at our new home. My mother was in charge of the atlas, linking the roads to find the shortest route. My four-year-old brother and I were relegated to the back seat and a box of toys. 

My father was known for not turning around no matter how lost he might be. “Oh, for god’s sake, Russell, turn around!” my mother would plead. But onward he would go. The running joke during my childhood was that we would end up in a farmer’s backyard before he would cave and agree to turn around. And then we did just that one day. The farmer’s wife appeared to see who was stopping by. Sheepishly, my father backed out, a flock of chickens squawking and flapping around the tires and an old dog of indiscriminate parentage raising its head sleepily to emit a halfhearted woof at the unfamiliar car. 

In the years after that first journey, we took numerous car trips, my brother and I still stationed in the back seat, my mother the navigator with her atlas on her lap, finger at the ready to tell my father where to take the next turn.  As the interstate highways were completed, we often took them to span the distance between places like south Texas, where we moved when I was six, and northern New Hampshire where my father attended a conference of fellow city managers. But the back roads were never truly abandoned. Unlike the highway rest stops built for long distance truckers, the small towns offered diners that few travelers visited any more. Roast beef sandwiches floating in brown gravy. Grits slathered with butter. Hot, flaky biscuits that melted in your mouth. Barbecue slow cooked in metal drums over mesquite wood. You couldn’t get that at a rest stop.  Every diner had a table of old men in overalls and plaid shirts drinking coffee, talking local politics and gossiping. Dressed in a crisp uniform, apron and cap with a corsage handkerchief pinned to the shoulder, the waitress kept the cups filled, trading snappy comments and laughs as she passed the table, pencil and order book in hand.

I had been living in New York City for nearly 20 years when my widowed mother came to join me for another road trip back to Wichita where she was once again living. Now it was my turn to get out the atlas and plan the trip. Highways were to be avoided. Inns were nighttime way stations; reservations were made at some and allowed daily mileage of  250 to 300 miles. Time was allowed for stopping along the way to see the sights, most of them far off the beaten tourist path but still noted on the atlas or in the books on each state that we were to pass through. We would take a week to make the trip out and a week to make it back with a few days in between to do the laundry and get the car ready for the return.

New Jersey is a state that has its good points but back roads are not among them. Highways provide multiple lanes meant to move vehicles large and small to their final destination as quickly and efficiently as possible. No lingering in small towns. No slowing down to enjoy the farms that dot the countryside, their rolling hills inviting the driver to stop at a farm stand, buy donuts and cider and sit at a wooden picnic table to savor the sight of cows standing placidly under the shade of a tree or a regiment of apple trees dappled with sunlight. The highway demands the driver’s attention as large trucks bound for California and Ohio, Texas and Michigan race against each other. Cars move in and out like flies trying to find a spot to rest before leaping into the next opening. Rest stops appear every few miles laden with fast food and video games, gift shops and soda machines and rest rooms with lines of travelers waiting impatiently for an open stall, anxious to get back on the highway. Staffed by uniformed teenagers and their adult supervisors from nearby small towns that were left behind when the highway was built, these rest stops are anything but restful for the road weary driver. 

I often take roads that run parallel to the highway. Most are a mile or more distant but there remain remnants of a time before the earth was moved to make way for interstate commerce. 

In the Midwest, small towns that have been largely abandoned dot the back roads; the only indication of life is the grain silo, a diner offering homemade pies and hot coffee, and a few houses decorated year round with Christmas lights with old tires, rusting cars and plastic trolls in the scraggly yards. The younger generation left long ago. A motel, or motor court as they were once called, stands silent at the edge of most small towns, overgrown with weeds, its fading welcome doormats askew worn and bare, and a cracked swimming pool empty and rimmed with a wire fence, mirroring the sign that once blinked gaily, “Welcome. Air conditioning. TV. Swimming pool.” The only inhabitants live on small government pensions or Social Security. Some work at the convenience store, serve breakfast at the diner, or plow snow in the winter for the county. It’s a hardscrabble existence as the town slowly fades around them, the high beams of trucks and cars racing along the distant highway disappear over the horizon.

Yet its those small towns and their ghosts that I seek out. I look for the historic signs planted along the roads or in small rest stops where a simple picnic table stands waiting for the traveler to rest awhile. The signs tell of events that took place nearby and the people who first settled there; of Native tribes who roamed the hills and plains; and wars that were fought. The signs show pride in local history; pride in survival; pride in ancestors and the events that shaped these clusters of people who were all seeking a better life. They found that life for awhile. Until the highway passed them by.