Country Roads

Before I wander into today's topic, I have to put my P.S. on the front bumper. As any good readers will have recognized, the borrowed entry about the recent Great Plains blizzards contrasting the Can-Do hardiness here with the recent Katrina-Gulf Coast disaster had a number of unmentioned factors. We do not like bureaucratic governments, most definitely including our state power players as well as the arrogant feds, but floodwater is not snowy solidity, our houses were not invaded by the snow, let alone venomous snakes and toxic molds, not everyone has wood-burning stoves (as we did coal furnaces in my childhood), and other differences can be cited. Nevertheless, I've always admired the self-reliant attitude of a weather-battered region much like New England but with farmland instead of quarries and forests. ( I once tried a poem likening my area to New England.)
So--I'm not a fan of John Denver's except for his Oh, God movies with George Burns endearing as the title deity at the end of his big cigar. But the song title fit my subject with its "yesterday," even as the West Virginia mountains do not match my Knox County landscape when I was growing up. I have driven the roller-coaster, winding Appalachian Mountain roads behind sludge-slow lumber and coal trucks, in front of apparently moonshine runners out of The Dukes of Hazzard outracing sheriffs, slamming around the curves. Northeastern Nebraska roads were not that spectacular.
More important, they were not paved. Only the federal highways, in our corner U.S. 81, 20, and 275, had asphalt, with the exception of Nebraska 14 from U.S. 20 through Verdigre into Niobrara, courtesy of an old drunk who was a powerful state legislator, deftly pork-barreling a paved road to his home even as a high-hill section of it kept sliding down into the Niobrara River close to his town. But we ordinarily drove on gravel.
Gravel takes some getting used to, especially when it's put down thickly and tires act akin to hydroplaning. Further, when fresh gravel was being applied to the eroded washboards and mudholes, a large ridge was dumped at one side, about two feet high, which ridge road graders would then work gradually across the roadway. Hit that ridge with a front wheel, and expect the front wheels to be ditchbound without some alert, strong steering. When I was learning to drive, coming up a steep ascent to make a sharp right turn onto the Bloomfield highway, Dad didn't think I was turning sharply enough, wrenching the wheel away from me, so that we hit a gravel ridge and lost control, rolling over three and a half times down the steep grade, with an empty bottle gas cylinder banging around in the rear seat. We boys had early gravel lessons, learning the hard way on our bicycles long before earning our driver's licenses, gravel being even trickier for those thin tires. Jackie Brockman wiped out as we biked down the big, long hill immediately east of town, wrecking his knee as an object lesson. Gravel burns, nasty stinging abrasions, from falls were common.
To compensate for driving over the dusty, skittering product of ancient Ice Age eskers, pasture boulders and gravel pits with Pleistocene fossils common in our area, winter driving in ice and snow was easier, else why would cities strew gravel on their skating-rink streets? Gravel roads also meant that snowplows would gouge out gashes that became muddy obstacles as they rammed snowplow-wide paths, no pavement to give a grinding-noise caution. Along those often single-lane paths through high drifts, occasional small areas were widened as some mountain roads still are, as I saw in Glacier National Park, where you have to wait for the other person before you navigate the single lane. Ironically, the shelterbelts of, usually, five parallel tree rows, encouraged in the Forties meant that east-west roads especially had high drifts from our prevailing north winter winds. Snow fences, common then, also had the safe effect.
Simply gravel on earth, those road surfaces sponged up water, mud sometimes almost as slippery as ice and considerably deeper. The diagonal shortcut from Plainview to Norfolk runs through spring-fed pastures (Aunt Lizzie made me pick her cattails from the marshy ditches). When I was going to Norfolk Junior College, I became acquainted with the whompetty whomp of that road's large sinking sections; I also regularly got flat tires, another gravel-road hazard, easier to fix in those days but nuisances. Today, from small towns dying and feeding their remnants into Norfolk's big-franchise centers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, the heavy traffic speeds over the level, albeit much-patched oil, oblivious to the spring-water ditches of cow parsnip, queen-of-the-prairie, and cattails and the wet haying pastures with lavender liatris (gayfeather) spikes.
State 13 between Creighton and Center, with its 13 bridges--the State Highway Department didn't suffer triskaidekaphobia, obviously-- in 11 miles, carried on a constant back-and-forth conversation with the Bazile Creek, a mere brook at the Creighton depot but a very respectable creek providing boys wet summer pleasures and winter skating by the time it reached Center. When the Bazile flooded, it tended to wipe out the steel bridges, including the one at the very edge of town, between Clarks and Danahers, on the old road to Verdigre (a very big deal, the bridge deposited, half buried in silt, a half mile north), and a couple on the road north to Niobrara, though that section of 13 stayed fearfully along the west side of the northbound Bazile (which ultimately empties into the Missouri) except for three bridges, one immediately north of Center, one at Pat Frazier's, one by Maiden's Leap. The Bazile flooded any sections of the road lying low at its side after major thunderstorms with heavier downpours than our hills could absorb. As mentioned previously, this was before farmers put in dams to catch the runoff and ran irrigation pipes from the creek. Today the Bazile is mostly shin deep except after very heavy rains.
I can attest to those 13 bridges, many on curves, because, coming home from NJC one moonless night, I knew only that I lost steering after the stop sign at the east edge of Creighton. (Dad discovered the next morning a bolt on the steering column sheared off.) Whenever I see one of those Errol Flynn/Tyrone Power/Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers--swashbucklers were our Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl or Master and Commander: Far Side of the World back in the 1930s-40s-50s--or the Horatio Hornblower series I'm fond of and see someone spinning a ship's wheel, I am reminded of that night, rather, very early morning of no other traffic, when I had to spin the freed-up steering wheel until it caught with a lurch, every one of those bridges, notably the ones on curves, a special challenge.
For that matter, the road to Verdigre was a similar challenge but without many bridges, just lots of hills, constant curves, often a combination like the right-angle one that dropped steeply at the turn, off which Don Buerman sailed into a tree, his girlfriend and future wife, Virginia McManigal, smashing into the windshield in those days of no seat belts, so that we all went from intermission at a dance in Center out to the bloody site. We thought Neal Sandoz an Indianapolis candidate because he could cover those nine hair-raising miles to his Verdigre girlfriend's (also later his wife) in 11 minutes, I think it was. The only section of that old road remaining is immediately west of Center for about five miles until it runs into the bland new asphalt one of long, straight stretches. (And it begins in Center a block south of the original.)
I should add, in contrast to today's approaches, then State 84 from Bloomfield to Verdigre and State 13 from Creighton to Niobrara, crossed at Center's main intersection, where Dad hung the lonely crossed strands of colored bulbs at Christmastime. Another footnote is that 13 from Creighton through Center to Niobrara was often cited as one of the state's most scenic drives, mainly because of the curvy, hilly roads among the oaks, ash, elms tracking the Bazile. All our roads today are paved, straighter, duller, safer, the landscape darkening with the weedy greenblack eastern red cedar woods spreading across the pastures.
Roads held their own kinds of adventure back then. Not quite like Dad and [Great] Uncle Joe Koftan going up to North Dakota to follow the wheat harvest down or off to Yellowstone in the Twenties in their Model T. I know they didn't have many roads--Dad said something about cutting across the land--and certainly not many filling stations so that they carried their own gasoline, tire repairs, tool kit--but I will be forever sorry I didn't ask him more about it, now that I've been all over Wyoming and the rest of the West on our asphalt comfort trails. That oversight gravels me.