The joys of the open road

In which country roads do not take me home but at least don't get me killed, and pretty pictures and obnoxious songs make everything better

Between Greensboro and Durham most of the “trail” is roadside, long stretches of walking on shoulders of country roads of varying activity punctuated by visits to parkland and preserves. Looking at a map I can guess where future connector trails might run—along Reedy Fork, perhaps, to where it joins the Haw River. For now there is only a zigzag of highways, byways, and residential streets laid out to pass points of interest and avoid roads with the highest traffic and lowest visibility while making reasonably good time. Given the lay of the land, it is probably the best available route.

I grew up on country roads; I used to ride my bicycle on them, in the days when children roamed freer and did not wear helmets. Those roads had some advantages over the ones I find myself walking now. Many of them were designed with Amish buggies in mind, and had wide shoulders. Cars were smaller in the years after the oil embargoes, as were pickup trucks, which were practical farm-country working vehicles and not substitute testicles. Drivers were more courteous. No one, at least, ever deliberately swerved towards me, as has happened once this fall.

These Piedmont roads are designed for nothing but motor vehicles, and the motor vehicles are large and fast. Sometimes the grass of the shoulders is wide, mown, and gently sloping; more often I am squeezed onto a narrow strip of crumbling, gravelly asphalt between the faded white paint of the lane marker and a weedy ditch. When a car approaches I move onto the ditch-slope. One morning, starting early to avoid the warmer afternoon and finding myself in a rural rush hour, I walked most of a mile or two on a shoulder with a thirty-degree slope and realized only once the outer half of my left foot started to hurt that it had been bearing most of my weight. For comfort I might switch sides, but then I couldn't see oncoming traffic.

“Roads,” Thoreau observed, “are made for horses and men of business.” Only the vehicle of choice and not the principle has changed. In 1850 at least the oncoming traffic gave you more time to get out of its way, though the roads were often parallel ruts as confining to wagon wheels as tracks to a train, and might be sunken from wear beneath the shoulders, so that escape meant climbing up. A six-horse freight wagon was nothing to tangle with, and its driver no more likely to move aside for lesser travelers than a half-ton pickup truck. (Though oddly I find the drivers of the semis rumbling through the industrial park to be most courteous to a pedestrian, and most likely to wave.) Nostalgia, in short, has its limits.

“I do not travel in [roads] much, comparatively,” Thoreau added, “because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.” Nor am I, and I would gladly short-cut or ramble through woods and fields were they not enclosed by law, custom, and No Trespassing signs. HDT was luckier, as he foresaw even then:

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

The “evil days,” I am sorry to say, have come, without improvement in opportunities.

Country roads may appear “scenic” from the window of a car. On foot is another matter. The walker's pace allows more time for looking, but this is pleasant only if there is much to see. The problem, for a walker on a rural road, is one of scale.

In the woods, everything may look the same in the aggregate—from a hundred yards away a tree is a tree—but at the level of detail there is tremendous variation. In July I might see six different members of the sunflower-daisy-aster family, all yellow; in early fall the fungi fruit in such profusion that it is hard to spot them all on one passing.

On the roadside, you are always passing something obviously different; houses and farms are unlike one another in obvious ways. Up close, though, the detail is always the same. The same weeds, the same asphalt, the same gravel. Whatever is interesting is seen only at a distance, and therefore passes very slowly.

Few landscapes are so dull as to bore a walker once. A round trip is something else. Walking east instead of west a forest may present so different an aspect as to seem an entirely different trail, but returning along a country road is merely rewinding the tape. You've seen it.

All this changes if there are people in the landscape. A golf course is the Muzak of landscape, but if people are playing, then there is something to watch. I watched a guy swing what I guessed to be a nine iron and saw the ball bounce, roll, and stop six feet from the hole; I resisted the impulse to applaud. I watched a man tee off in the morning sun like it was a PGA commercial, small in the distance like an icon, the thwack reaching me on the backswing.

Later I heard a conversation in the strip of woods by the road. —Titleist? —Yeah, Titleist. New ball. Frowning, and poking at pine straw. This would not be in the commercial, but it is equally entertaining.

I also saw a maintenance guy, who smiled and waved to me.

For the most part, though, there are no people in this landscape. The pick-your-own farm is closed for business, and lacking figures bent hunting among the greenery for perfect red berries or children choosing jack-o-lanterns, it is only a photograph, and not a very interesting one. A rectangle of corduroy brown in a grassy yard speaks of a plow, but no one works it. Farm equipment rusts in a field. Front yards sit empty but for Hallowe'en decorations. I pass a sign for Little Store Road, but the eponymous emporium is long gone.

At the high school, a line of busses stream off and back onto the road, but they discharge their passengers out of sight. Cars pass nearer, but speed and tinted windows make drivers only shadows. Rarely a window is down, and someone waves. Before long I am content if they acknowledge my existence only to the extent of slowing down or moving over. Occasionally I spot someone far off, too far to identify an action, let alone wave.

For miles-long stretches of country road, the only people present are either at a great distance or are shelded from me by technology. An effort is required to overcome that shielding, which few make. The effect is that there really seem to be no people here at all. In a natural landscape I would not miss them; the woods are about the woods. But this is not a natural landscape. It is a human landscape, even—especially—the farmland. City streets are more visibly enclosed but no more confining, and more visibly alive. Here the depopulation is something from a post-apocalyptic movie, or like the Internet. It is profoundly alienating.

A lone, bony horse watches me from a pen by a ranch house—dolefully, as horses will. As though he too feels alienated.

What consolations are there for the lonesome traveler?

Walking, I can stop to read a historical marker whose significance would escape me at sixty miles an hour, or even at twenty. REEDY FORK TRESTLE, the sign announces:.

Located 1 mile N/E the trestle was the scene of a skirmish between Confederate troops and a portion of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry commanded by Major A. B. Garner. Detached by General Stoneman, who was located near Winston-Salem, N.C., the Fifteenth was ordered to destroy the trestle. After a short fight the Federal detachment accomplished its mission unaware that a train carrying Confederate President Jefferson Davis and cabinet members to Greensborough had crossed only one hour earlier.

Like many such signs it is long on unimportant detail and short on context; it lacks even a date. Davis fled south after Lee surrendered his army at Appamattox on April 9, 1865, and arrived in Greensboro two days later, so this skirmish—fruitless, like so many—took place the morning of April 11. The Pennsylvanians caught up with Davis a month later in south Georgia, where he had fled disguised in his wife's cloak and shawl.

A time-honored pastime of bored travelers is song, and already feeling somewhat, shall we say, contrary amid my surroundings, I began to sing:

     Hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!
     We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!
     Hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree
     As we go marching on!

...that being one of the more colorful verses of “John Brown's Body,” invented by soldiers to fit a rousing old tune that Julia Ward Howe ripped off for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I am a Pennsylvanian, after all, and &$*% Jefferson Davis.

Inventing new words to old songs is also a time-honored pastime. The one quoted above is almost infinitely flexible. Perhaps there is some contemporary politician or industrial baron with a meter-appropriate name whom you might like to see hanged? Singing about it exercises creativity and vents frustration without the embarrassment and possible legal repercussions of posting on social media. Now is also a good time to curse faithless lovers, praise great victories, or mock sacred cows in satire. Only beware becoming too engrossed in your project: walking against morning traffic can be less like a march than a skirmish, and half-ton pickup trucks are deadlier than minie balls.

Or there is always photography. The act of composing a photograph—of finding a position from which, and a frame within which, some small piece of the world looks beautiful, or at least intriguing—draws my attention to the beautiful and intriguing. Continually seeking photographs keeps my attention there, and not on the ugly or the depressing.

That is precisely why a photograph is always a kind of lie. Context is everything. But this is art, not journalism. And I already told you the context.

Clouds help.

On these walks I have grown increasingly frustrated with the camera on my phone, notably with its lack of a macro lens and its lack of manual focus. Here, I was glad of it. The phone is right in my pocket and ready to go with two quick movements of a finger, which is about as much time as I often have, balanced on the edge of a drainage ditch between passing cars.

I said that this segment of the trail is punctuated by parkland and preserves. Next time out I’ll pass through one of them, and report back. And maybe also find a cup of coffee.

Notes and further reading

Thoreau is quoted from “Walking,” which you can find on the Internet in so many editions that I haven't bothered giving page numbers; a full-text search will be quicker, if you want to check up on me. Project Gutenberg is always a good place to start.

I didn’t think to snag a reference photo of the historical marker for Reedy Fork Trestle, but luckily someone else did. As for the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry, a crack regiment that fought together through most of the war, their story was told in the 1906 History of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry, whence we learn that

This Regiment, raised in the dark days of the war following the defeat of Pope in Virginia, was composed of young men of good character and physique, intelligence and spirit, carefully selected from nearly every county in Pennsylvania, from several- fold as many applicants. They were chiefly very young men — boys in fact — of good breeding and education, usefully occupied on railroads, farms, in law offices, stores and counting houses, machine shops, etc., or but just out of school or college....

The recruits for this Regiment came almost without solicitation, and without a single promise of office, commissioned or non-commissioned, directly or indirectly.... [However] It can, I think, be truthfully said that before the war closed but few of them were not competent to be officers.

I’ll dedicate the first leg of Segment 9 to them.