Evil Roads, Good Roads

A beautiful day. Cool and clear. Took the dog for a long walk in the fields.

There's a spot I pass ...

The old road -- I don't know how old it is -- used to run slantwise across this abandoned farm I walk through. When the 'New Road' -- it's more than a hundred years old -- was put in, the old road was plowed up and fields planted. The mark of the Old Road is gone under the grass, except for two places.

One remnant is benign, a rutted track in the woods with a stone wall on one side. Huge trees grow out of that wall, holding the big stones under their roots. This stretch happened to go somewhere, I think, up over the hill. Maybe they came out here to shoot deer. But it lives, after a fashion, for a few more years. There are nut trees all around it. Beechnuts.

The other spot's different. Way out in the center of the fields there's a place left unplowed. A piece of the road rises up out of woods and grass like it comes from nowhere. It runs by rock foundation of a small building, then gets swallowed up by the earth again. One side is cut off by the trunk of a fallen tree. That sucker must be eight feet in diameter, easy. A buncha oak and conifer and cypress take up around the foundations, but there's nothing growing inside. Just moss and scrub grass.

Me, I don't mess with it. And I walk sunways around it when I pass by.


Oh. I finished Chapter Twelve. I may be setting myself up for trouble later, in that I'm not laying good background for some plot devices that appear ten and more chapters upstory.

But I can't do everything.

Sufficient unto the chapter, says I.