The roads less traveled can take you home

The interstate cut through North Dakota. It was straight, two lanes and flat. Snow covered fields spread like thick white blankets on both sides of the highway. Broken fences seemed to weave through the soft mounds of snow, some with dented “Reagan for President” signs nailed to the heavy, crooked posts. Coiled wires, like frozen snakes, sprang from the wood. The remains of weatherbeaten barns lay in tumbled piles, as if they were melting into the snow and earth below.

My sister and I passed by quickly in my little brown Subaru. We had left my grandparent’s farm that morning and we were on our way home, to California. The landscape was a blur as we sped down the highway.

There was no sunset as we drove into Sidney, Nebraska.

The streets were empty, dark and quiet. We found a motel with creaking floors, musty air and scratchy blankets. The wall heater squeaked and groaned as it pushed warm air through the room. We fell sound asleep.

The morning sky was steel gray. We loaded up, started the car and drove onto the road. I stepped on the gas pedal. The car would not accelerate. It felt like I was driving through mud. I thought the engine might be cold, so I tried again. Something was wrong.

Hours later, a mechanic walked away from my car, his grease-stained coveralls drooping beneath his thick waist. The flaps on his wool cap covered his ears and a few thin strands of hair stuck out from underneath the cap. My transmission had failed, he had told us, and it was going to take more time and money than I had to fix it. We might make it to California, but we would not be going any faster than forty miles an hour. In the middle of winter.

My sister and I decided to take our chances.

I could see the mechanic’s breath as he muttered to himself, shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. He disappeared into his cave-like shop. He did not look back. The red and blue neon “Sidney Automotive” sign over the door to the shop glowed weakly in the late morning light; the “n” sputtered on and off. The smell of diesel oil and gasoline seemed to ooze through our windows, filling the car like a cloud.

Feeling as if we were limping without a cane; we drove away from the shop and parked the car. Snowflakes, like tiny crystals, scattered across the windshield. In the warmth of my idling car, my sister and I watched as the snow melted, then trickled down the foggy glass in narrow, wobbly streams. It was time for a new plan. Forty miles an hour meant taking the back roads.

Spreading a map over the steering wheel, we stared, bewildered, at the red and the blue lines, the thick and thin black lines, the thread-like light blue lines. They interlaced and spread across the map like an intricate spider web. We measured distances with our fingers and traced lines. Thin black lines curled like tendrils growing from the thick, straight, vine-like interstate roads. Those were the roads we were going to take. The thin roads.

Leaving Sidney that morning, we drove past the signs directing us to the interstate. A man in a rusty green pickup nodded his head and waved, his truck shuddered and rattled as he passed.

The snow had stopped falling.

Gravel kicked up and crunched under the wheels as we hobbled along. We felt every pot hole and gust of wind. At first, the days, the roads, the drive seemed endless, or that we could walk faster than we were driving.

There were no walls or barriers lining the roads. We went by little children in front of whitewashed farm houses; bundled up, laughing and digging in the snow. Rows of empty clotheslines crisscrossed yards with no fences. Mud splattered yellow school buses lumbered slowly down gravel roads. We stopped at a store with a wooden porch one day, the wood seemed to sigh wearily as we walked into the store. A silver-haired woman wearing an apron with yellow flowers smiled at us and said “thank you” when we paid her and called me “honey.”

White faced cattle trotted through snowy fields, their steamy breath enveloping them like fog while farmers stacked brown-gold bales of hay near barns with peeling red paint. A worn and bent chain link fence surrounded several gravestones in one field, the gate hung open. A bouquet of bright red plastic flowers leaned against a stone.

In the evening light, through misty windows, we could see families settling, like nesting birds, for the night.

By the time we got to Utah and then Nevada, we had to use the interstate. We drove through corridors of high, steel railings and cement walls. City lights flashed on the horizon. Drivers in shiny black and silver cars looked straight ahead, moving fast. We felt like we were standing still as long semi-trucks, like elephants in a parade, blew their horns at us as they rumbled by. There were no more fields, no children running and laughing, no crunching gravel. I wanted to shout “slow down.” I wanted to get back on the thin roads.

Thin roads are not the easy roads. They are long and crooked and bumpy. You have to go slow on the thin roads. They can take you to places you never knew you needed to be and to see things you did not know you needed to see. Thin roads are simple and muddy, breathtaking and full of life. They are the “ones less traveled by.” The ones that “make all the difference.” Thin roads brought me home.