Roads

Roads fascinate me. I don’t mean just highways built for automobiles. I am fascinated by the very concept of a public way by which people may travel from where they are to wherever they want to be. The road is the ultimate symbol of freedom in America. We each are free to strike out upon it to seek our fortunes, to hit it if we feel unwelcome, to mosey on down it when the mood strikes us. The road carries new people into our lives, entertains us with the view of a world passing by our door and offers a welcomed route of escape from imminent danger.

Certain public ways are special to me; most special is the Appalachian Trail. I was a young boy when I first learned that a continuous footpath ran 2,160 miles from Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia. I immediately resolved to one day walk its entire length. While I have yet to complete the trek I do manage to hike at least some portion of the trail when my travels happen to intersect its course. Each visit to the Appalachian Trail seems magical and I often feel the urge to continue hiking, leaving the world and its problems behind for others to solve.

The Lincoln Highway was America’s first trans-continental road, conceived in 1913 specifically with automobiles in mind. It was designed to connect New York and San Francisco with a well-graded gravel roadway. Early motorists, forced to navigate muddy and unmarked, single-lane tracks once they strayed from local streets, could at last venture to travel from coast to coast with a reasonable expectation of completing their trip. In the years that followed, numbers rather than names designated federal highways. The original route of the Lincoln Highway today is comprised of portions of US 1, US 30, US 530, US 40 and US 50. US Route 30 passes within 20 miles of my home.

The DuPont Highway runs north and south through the state of Delaware and was the worlds first divided highway. T. Coleman duPont offered to build the road in 1908 and donate it to the citizens of the state. Conceived as a broad transportation corridor consisting of parallel one-way paved dual-lanes, gravel farm service roads and rail tracks, the road was completed as only a single-lane paved highway in 1924. The state did not want to assume the cost of maintaining such an ambitious project. Delaware soon led the nation in highway construction and in 1933 the DuPont Highway was finally widened into a dual highway. Today it is known as US Route 13. Much of my boyhood was spent in towns along or near its path.

Traveling the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a twice-annual ritual as I accompanied my grandparents to Minnesota to spend the summers at their lakeside home. It was like no other American road; cloverleaf interchanges, roadside picnic tables, modern service plazas with restaurants, gift shops and gas stations, exciting passages beneath mountains through long, lighted tunnels. The tollbooth attendants wore crisp uniforms and were always courteous. I imagined that working in the tollbooth must be the greatest job in the world; meeting so many nice people on their way to exciting places. Today’s typical interstate highway is more modern, but turning from a narrow road onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1951 was like being rocketed into the future.

Hiking any trail through the wilderness fires my imagination. I am conscious that my footsteps follow in those of Native Americans who hunted and lived for generations on the surrounding land. I am reminded of the pioneers who struggled through dangerous and unknown terrain in search of safety and a meadow that they could claim as their own. I imagine the wild creatures that preceded man by millennium and blazed these pathways by instinct between sources of water and food. Wilderness trails are like time machines, transporting me to a world that existed before man had need even to invent the word “progress.” Alone on a trail I do not always feel comfortable but I always feel that I have returned to a place where I belong.

I am intrigued by the short stretches of abandoned road I sometimes spy paralleling my travel route. They are victims of obsolescence, snippets of once important and well-traveled roadways that lost their value when greater speeds dictated a need for wider lanes, shallower curves and higher banking. Sometimes these orphaned paths assume a new role as extended driveways to houses that once sat near the thoroughfare but now are set well back from the new route. Some lucky few homeowners gained possession of a private bridge, originally built to carry commerce and travelers between communities but now crossed only on ones way to school, work or the grocery.

What I like most about roads is that each one is an invitation to explore. I enjoy coming upon a road and being almost surprised as my hands turn the wheel unconsciously toward the new path just because I find something interesting in the way it curves down into the trees. Or, perhaps a sign suggests that changing course and going that way now will lead me to something of interest.

Any road that ends at a stop sign is a public way, a path I am free to follow if only I want to. I love to mosey on down the road on a Saturday morning with no destination in mind. Every intersection becomes an opportunity for adventure. The paths I choose seldom disappoint me. It seems to matter little whether I turn left or right. If I show any preference it is, like Robert Frost, to take the road less traveled.