Sun-dappled asphalt or 'An Ode to Summer Backroads'

around here

a local backroad in summer

I’ve got this new gig that takes me, every Friday and Saturday afternoon, about an hour away from home — through the backroads and down toward the beach. It’s quicker to take the highway, but only by a few minutes. So you leave a few minutes early, because my god, there’s nothing like a good backroad.

My general theory is that all great backroads are alike but each backroad is unique. There are backroads that thread through the lush towers-of-trees in the Pacific Northwest and there are backroads that wind through the hot swamps of Florida. But I’m not from either of those places. Around here, the backroads are more humble.

The land around here is flat, all they really grow is chicken and corn. But they grow a hell of a lot of chickens around here — 200 million chickens come out of this place every year, more than anywhere else in the world. And so you drive along the backroads and pass a field and another field and then you see the chicken-houses. They’re set back a bit from the road, great 500-foot-long houses stretched out low alongside the fields. The chicken-houses have red sides and their metal roofing rusts in a blooming sort-of-way. And then you pass another cornfield with an irrigation system propped-up on wheels like some huge-metal insect. And then, if you’re lucky, the backroad winds through the woods and the trees are so thick and green that they become a wall alongside the road; and over the road, they stretch until their branches touch, wrap together, and form a canopy. The sunlight that falls through the canopy is tinted green and lays along the asphalt in fat speckles of gold and everything, everything, is perfect.

So you ride through this little piece of perfect and your mind begins to wander off on its own. It dawdles along the things that have happened to you, stumbles upon some old lover; and because everything has gone quiet inside your head, your wandering mind startles over the strangest fragments of memory.¹ You remember something like a single movement — how once, on the beach, the sun came like a tangle into her thick hair as she lifted herself onto an elbow and glanced at you, smiled, then lay back down. But the frame is gone, as quickly as it arose, and it leaves only an airy taste along the roof of your mouth as you emerge from the forest and into the cornfields. And your mind continues onto something totally unrelated — like why Petya Rostov had to die at the end of the book.

None of these are worrisome thoughts. You don’t worry about anything when you’re driving on a backroad because, well, because you just don’t. I’ve said that all great backroads are alike and they all have that in common — they are catalysts for introspection, a specific sort of carefree introspection where you drive with your mind in the empty passenger seat beside you.

Backroads are meant to be driven alone. And they are best in the hour before dusk, when the late sky swoons all purple and maroon and golden over the fields and licks the tops of the corn and the roofs of the chicken houses. On a backroad, the sun doesn’t sink down in the sky — it swells over the land, it redefines the laws of nature and the sun sets horizontally.

Or maybe backroads don’t look like this to everybody. Maybe backroads only act this way on me. Maybe it’s one of those things that come from growing up somewhere better described as nowhere. I think about these backroads and the land around them in the same way Camus thinks about his home in Algiers, a la this graph:

Sometimes, in Paris, when people I esteem ask me about Algiers, I feel like crying out: ‘Don’t go there.’ Such a joke would have some truth in it. For I can see what they are expecting and I know they will not obtain it. And, at the same time, I know the charms and the subtle power of this country, it’s insinuating hold on those who linger there, how it immobilizes them, first of all by ridding them of questions, and finally by rocking them to sleep in everyday life.

But then as I begin to suspect this might be the case — that these backroads only mean anything to the people who grew up along them — I’m stunned by the way they appear at hours I’d forgotten they can still possess. How they look in the middle of the night when the fireflies are dancing just above the fields, so thick that the whole night glimmers with their sticky yellow light. Or how they look in the morning with a fog rising from the field and a family of deer lingering along the tree line, darting in-and-out of the forest. And of course it’s not just me, how arrogant to think that I’m the only one can see this.

And yet that’s another of the obvious pleasures of backroads: the distinct feeling that you and you alone are the only one witnessing this. There are no other cars on these roads, maybe a chicken-house here or there but nothing that suggests civilization. And really, there’s not anything special about a backroad. There’s only the chicken-houses and the fields at dusk and what they do to you. The way they wrap you in a daze and for a few moments, everything is perfect.

1. How accurate are these memories? Who the hell knows — remember in Proust when he writes about how the memory of things past is not necessarily the memory of things as they were. But does that transmutation of the memories make them any less powerful when you stumble upon them on a backroad? No, obviously not. Because the recollection and the act of it is as much about the exterior scenery as it is about your interior processes.