Travelogue

I'll take the narrow road over interstates any day

By Greg Rohloff
Business Correspondent

Don't make me drive that wearying interstate highway with its bridges squeezed to a single lane for the unending repairs and improvements that seemed so unnecessary when the highway was new, a marvel that bypassed small towns, straightened the bends and trimmed hours from trips.

Now the constant flow of long-haul freight trucks presses you for every inch as if they were being charged to travel the road by the millisecond.

Give me, instead, those old two-lanes that split the farm fields and connect the small towns.

Sure the roads bump and dip and take odd little bends around the fields and pastures, and the towns are little more than stale reminders of their pasts.

The interstate is a get-there-and-be-done-with-it ride, broken only by the truck stops gussied up under the travel plaza LED signs flashing the price of gas and the specials on a 44-ounce drink.

The two-lane is indeed the road less traveled that opens up to a series of simple wonders, the thoughts that, once sparked, lead to bigger questions; the road is indeed as important as the destination.

Leave early in the morning on a two-lane and you will watch a day unfold in a way that can never be on the interstate.

Instead of alternately fighting the boredom that would lull you to sleep, playing the speed-up, slow-down game with truckers and catching sight of the highway patrolman's blue-and-red light bar flashing as a ticket is written and handed over, you pick your own pace, more or less, and mark off the trip mentally in the twenty-mile distances between towns.

You wonder what lies beyond what you see, whether it be the wildflowers blooming in the ditch or the mysteries hidden by a bend in a river, or just what does a man do to make a life in one of these places, where the natural beauty and the leftover junk of civilization marry into a forced existence, part comforting, part jarring.

What makes one farmer successful while across the road a neighbor struggles until the dream falls apart?

At the first, the white clapboard house with the green shingled roof is gone, replaced by a mini-mansion lifted straight from the suburban subdivisions that have eaten up the farm fields closest to the cities.

Down the road, what made another man post the auction sign on the light pole at the farmhouse turn-in next to the real estate for-sale sign?

That farm had once provided from cradle to grave for a family, a life tied to the change of seasons and all that the changes entail, from the crickets' song on a summer night to the unrestrained glory of a thunderstorm that can bring life to the crops with rain or pound them to the ground with hail, to autumn's hushed warning that winter draws near, that work must be done now to get you through to spring.

Is it mere chance that one prospers and another moves on?

And the wheat fields turn a reddish-gold with narrow streaks of unripened green stalks zigging through them.

These fields look as if they will soon be harvested, that is if the weather doesn't turn, bringing rain instead of heat and sunshine needed to ripen the grain.

You have to wonder if the fields will make, if the yields will be worthwhile to hire the harvest crews moving north as crops ripen, their combines stacked on trailers too wide for a single lane as they pass, the crews jammed in between in pickup trucks, rusty and dented, their emergency flashers blinking a warning to slow down as they move over onto the muddy shoulder.

These fields, after all, were struck with freezes in early spring, when the plants were booting.

In a couple of weeks, given enough hot weather and sunshine, the heads may bend down, heavy with kernels, or they may simply flap in the afternoon breeze, shriveled and void of any seeds, until they have beaten themselves into dust, another reminder of the narrow line between reward and failure.

And when you cross the creek that usually is a trickle from summer to winter, you see the rushing water swirling around the lower limbs of willows growing wild along the banks and the cottonwoods' young silver-green leaves shimmering in the breeze.

The water rushes toward a series of other tributaries of the Mississippi and the relentless flow to the Gulf of Mexico to complete its cycle from sea to air to land and back to sea.

And you wonder, if you had the time and the inclination, whether a shady spot along the bank might produce a fishing hole where muddy catfish feed as the waters race past them, or if the stream is filled with the fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that have made the neighboring fields so productive and the river's bounty unsafe for consumption.

Could a world go hungry, you wonder, if the fields weren't sprayed and the creeks and rivers flowed untainted?

And, would you stop if they were as pristine as the day they first flowed, or would you merely admire the momentary view as you pushed on, saying to yourself that the shady spot would be a nice place for a picnic, as if you would ever have time to stop some day.

And what of those small towns, their grain silos the central reason for their existence, as freight trains rumble through without stopping while empty wheat hoppers stretch along the side tracks awaiting the harvest.

The liveliest spot in town is the mini-mart, a "C" store in the trade, and it carries an odd mix — gum, tobacco, soft drinks, beer, videos and baby food, and self-serve gasoline pumps.

As the years have passed, the other buildings have faded, their paint cracking and graying; once perfectly good buildings now empty.

What would it be like to live here, maybe next door to the man, maybe a welder by trade, who has decorated his yard with dinosaurs made from old truck bumpers and cutout profiles painted black of a cowboy kneeling at a cross?

Would you tire of his art, wishing he'd stay busy in the welding shop fixing plows and other farm implements, knowing that such a wish is unlikely as farmers continued to sell out to neighbors wanting larger farms to take greater advantage of subsidies and position themselves better to pay for the larger and more expensive equipment at the equipment dealer across from the Co-op grain elevator?

And you wonder about what the town will be like in another five years or ten years.

Will a renaissance bring new life, or will it continue to fade until it, too, will be only a memory and a train stop for the grain and cattle cars while its residents scatter to other neighboring towns waiting their turn to fade away, clinging to the hope that the school or the bank or some other little enterprise will be enough to keep the town going?

You have to wonder if the towns will find ways to survive, just as you wonder if the farmers will survive without thinking of their work as just another business rather than a way of life.

You just have to wonder as you pass by and start marking the next 20 miles on your journey, past more fields where red-tail hawks perch overhead on the power lines and scan the scene unconcerned with passers-by such as you, and you reach another town, pinning its hopes on somehow being better at something, anything, than its neighbors.

You just have to wonder.

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Posted: Aug. 7, 2008