I have always loved a good road trip. With the approach of summer, I want to hop in the car and head out to destinations known or unknown.
When our children were small, we used to play a game called Five Turns. Each child had a turn at directing where we went. After he or she picked five left or right turns, it then became the next person’s turn to do likewise. And so we wandered about the area, their collective intent to get us so lost or so far from home that Dad, who always had the final turn, could not get us back home with his five turns. Incredibly, I almost always did.
Through the years we have also taken some marvelous road trips across the country. I think back on a road trip I took a dozen years ago with three of my daughters into the heartland of America. We were moving one of those daughters to live in Kansas City.
For my birthday that year, just two days before we started our 2,869-mile foray into the middle of America, I received the book
Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways by Larry McMurty. A timely gift. And one of two books we took as we began our meandering journey through six states, on this particular trip staying mostly off the Interstate freeways. The other book was Ray Bradbury’s
Dandelion Wine, which one of my daughters read aloud as we made our way across the back roads of Wyoming and Nebraska. I thoroughly enjoyed both books.
The evening after we finally reached Kansas City, I finished reading
Roads. I share the author’s passion for books and roads. In his final chapter, McMurty wrote:
“Some years ago I had a sobering realization about . . . roads. There are too many nice ones. I could go on for a long time, driving America’s roads. I could see the sand hills of Nebraska, follow the old Oregon Trail along the North Platte, see the Tetons, dodge moose in Maine, slip down to Salt Lake City and remind myself what an inspired city planner Brigham Young had been.
“But I can’t drive all the roads. On even the narrowest highways that I’ve driven on these trips, and in even the smallest towns, there are signs pointing down even narrower highways to even smaller towns, many of which I will never see.”
Something like that thought occurred to me the afternoon before we reached Kansas City. We were pushing south along U.S. 75 in eastern Nebraska. We knew from our road atlas that a little town named Talmage, population 246, was in these parts. Our second son is named Talmage, and we thought it would be interesting to see the place that shared his name.
As we were searching for Talmage, we overshot our intended turn off by a few miles, so we turned instead onto a little paved road that after a half mile turned into a “rock road,” so called by the friendly farmer from Talmage who stopped to see if we needed help as we sat at roadside studying the atlas. He wondered whom we were visiting in Talmage and, after we explained our purpose in visiting there, said that we could indeed arrive there along the rock road (what I would call a dirt or gravel road) that his tractor was planning to follow but suggested we go back and take the regular road instead.
“Maybe I’ll see you there,” was his parting comment. He seemed so helpful. I was almost surprised we weren’t invited for supper.
We backtracked to state highway 128, one of those narrower roads that lead to even smaller towns that McMurty referred to in his book, and I thought of all the myriads of little roads like this that crisscross the places people call home. After a few miles heading west, we turned south on state highway 67 and after another couple miles had to take an even narrower road, a half-mile spur that led to the little town. Talmage. Like so many other towns we’d seen here in the Midwest, the name was proudly emblazoned on the town’s water tower, as if water towers wandered off or were misplaced and had to be returned from time to time to their rightful owners.
My journeys through the years have taken me to 46 of the 50 states. Only four more to go: Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Wisconsin. I have also been to all 29 of the counties here in Utah. I hope someday to drive the entire width of the country on U.S. 50, a highway that runs from California to Maryland. A mileage sign at the western end of U.S. 50 lists how far it is to three cities. The final one, Ocean City, Maryland, is 3,073 miles away.
That’s a challenge I find hard to ignore.
But still, there are so many roads to travel, so many places to visit, so many things to see along the way. In this or a dozen life times I will never get to them all. The same with books: there are so many good ones, worthwhile ones, I’ll never get to read. And some books deserve to be read more than once, just as certain places deserve to be visited more than once.
I’m not even sure where this meandering thought is taking us. It is like another road trip we took once with a different subset of the family, resulting in a wide swing through several southern states. We had no particular destination in mind beyond simply exploring a part of the country we were not familiar with, states like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. Each morning we’d awake, eat the motel’s breakfast, repack the car, and hit the road again, studying our atlas along the way, stopping as we wanted, sidetracking to points of interest.
It was on that trip we discovered the town of Eutaw (pronounced like “Utah,” but with something of a southern drawl) in the western part of Alabama. The town of some 2,500 people boasts 27 antebellum structures on the National Register of Historic Places. We also discovered the Natchez Trace, a 444-mile parkway administered by the National Park Service than runs through Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And we stopped at some plantation mansions, including the historic Springfield Mansion near Fayette, Mississippi, that was built in the late 1700s. Arthur LaSalle, the old southern gentleman who lived there, regaled us with stories of earlier glory days as we sat on the upper balcony, after touring the mansion, as afternoon melded into evening twilight and fireflies began to appear.
But I digress. I was wondering where this meandering thought was taking us. I think it is headed toward the announcement that at the end of July, after working for the Church for thirty-nine and a half years, I am retiring. I will be traveling into the next phase of my life’s journey. And I am heading toward it with some amount of anticipation and excitement, a feeling akin to discovering what exactly will greet us over that next rise, what opportunities we will encounter, what destination will be at the end of the roads we travel on.
I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” that I have loved since school days:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet know how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
