Topic 12: Interesting By-Paths

Carol:

Blue By-ways

At the end of May 1986, we bought an old Clark motorhome and headed off with two pre-schoolers on an 18,000 mile journey around North America, no itinerary and no calendar, going to sleep when it got dark, getting up when it got light. Space was tight, but we always had room for books and a chapter an evening of Tom Sawyer read out loud got us through the first month. I brought along a book that had been popular in the early 1980’s and I savored it as we drove along the Trans-Canada Highway and turned south for Glacier and Yellowstone, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. I love a good map as much as a book—I’m the family joke on this one—so the title appealed to me, taken from the color system on the Rand McNally maps to show the “roads less taken” of rural America.

By the time we had followed the blue roads across the midwest , Ontario and Quebec, the weather and the leaves were changing and the metal walls of our Rolling Home were beginning to confine; so, we headed down the coast of New England and found a post- Labor Day deal on a cabin near Orleans on Cape Cod. From the serendipity of travel without routine, we settled into a simple daily rhythm. After breakfast we wandered the little cove behind the cottage, perfecting the art of “turn up stuffing” we had learned from reading Pippi Longstockings, to find little treasures of fishermen’s line, water-worn glass, and discarded crab shells. Later in the morning, would make a trip to the little public library, then explore the now tourist-less towns and beaches of the Cape.

As the weather began to chill, we repacked the RV with the idea of heading south to the warmer Carolinas, but we spent one more week traveling the backroads of Massachusetts in search of Thoreau and Dickinson. Two images from those final days in New England stick in my mind, and they could not be farther apart in the emotions they evoke. The first is of five-year old Megan, pigtails flying in Pippi Longstockings fashion, screaming in terror as she lost control of her two-wheeler bicycle and gained frightful speed. She knew I was laughing as I tried to chase her down (it was the pigtails, kiddo), and she has never quite forgiven me for that. The second was a last, quiet walk through the woods with kidlets and walking sticks in tow. Suddenly, we came to a fork in the road that stopped us. Which way to go—left, right, turn around? And then I felt it, I mean I really FELT it, the incredible beauty and depth, the profound simplicity of one poem:

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
(Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” 1920)
Source: http://www.bartleby.com/119/1.html

Megan:

When I was in college, I would occasionally go through phases where I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, and I would plot a course to my classes that I knew would avoid the busiest parts of campus. Sometimes this meant it would take a half an hour to walk to a class that would otherwise have taken 5 minutes. At Mills College, in Oakland, I wandered the hills above the school and would spend hours sitting on the banks of Lake Aliso, writing in my journal. I marveled at the overgrown beauty so close to a major freeway and wondered why more students didn’t come up there. But whenever I saw one, I would bristle with irritation.

While studying abroad at the University of Sussex, in England, I did the same thing, but had a lot more people to avoid. Luckily there was a lot more ground. The university is located in the South Downs, which was considered an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is now a national park.



Just over the hill from the university was Stanmer Park, which consisted of a scattering of cottages, a church, farmland and a large house – where the lord of the manor must have once lived. No one lived in the big house anymore, and it appeared to be undergoing renovation, and the surrounding parklands seemed mostly to be used by dog walkers.


I discovered these places by accident. I had been vaguely aware that there was a lake and a park, but I didn’t know where they were and never deliberately set out to find them. That made my discovery of them, in the course of grumpy, anti-social wanderings through overgrown paths and woods, all the more special.