Okay, let’s grab a chance to set aside an hour, hop in the car and take a drive. Today, however, instead of taking the freeway to the next major city or your local highway to the closest town or even the nearest through street to that trendy neighborhood brewpub – which we both know will take you a lot more than an hour – let’s take a drive on some back roads. These are mostly spare roads that people are hardly using right now. I mean, they may not be as good as your main roads or thoroughfare or even a side street and some of them may not even be paved. Because we’re always needing roads they just know that someday we’ll find a use for them so they save them and put them out back. That’s why they call them backroads…maybe.
The federal government used to keep these roads in central storage facilities in the midwest but during the F.D. Roosevelt administration they decided to distribute them to the public along with jobs, ration stamps and those 5 pound blocks of cheese (which they’re still not out of). Later on they took these storage facilities and made missile silos out of them. Now they’ve filled the missile silos all with dirt, concrete, asphalt and other paving materials, which they could have used to generate more roads – go figure.
Now before you take off, don’t confuse backroads with sideroads. Sideroads, too, are quite common and can be found near or often right beside many main roads, if you can believe that. They can usually be identified by names like “Rough River Road” or “Cherry Creek Drive” or “Porky Parkway” – things near which they run or destinations to which they go. Often these sideroads existed alone for quite some time because people actually wanted to go to these places. Finally some astute person pointed out the error of having a side road without the benefit of a main road from which it stemmed so the local residents were faced with the options of renaming the sideroad something mundane, like “County Road 118.3” or “Brown County 7.” Taxes were then increased to generate more money for additional roads to connect to the sideroads. This is the American way… Except in some metropolitan areas like Illinois, where you pay taxes for the roads and then you pay again when you actually want to use them. This is the “Chicago way.” This method also works for “protection” for your business and expensive loans in alleyways, but that’s for a different article.
“Fine,” you say. “I’ll take a backroad. But where do I start?”
This is the easiest part of the whole process. Look out your window. Wait! Take this paper with you. Okay, look out the window. See that street? That’s your best place to begin. Some schools of thought advocate the need to go to the edge of town to start or maybe the first main highway. I have always found the best place to start is where you’re at… It seems if you have to go somewhere else to “start”, you never quite get around to it.
Once you take off on your aimless backroad drive, you should actually have an aimless backroad. Identifying one is fairly easy. First of all, it won’t be more than two lanes and in most cases, it won’t be paved – unless a politician lives there, which is unlikely since they all move to the city to keep their finger on the pulse of America. Of course, the city they move to is usually Washington, D.C., where they know absolutely nothing about the pulse of America. They also know nothing about the respiration, blood pressure, cholesterol level or kidney output of America, much less the backroad system. Let’s just simplify. You turn onto a gravel road and drive for, oh, a couple of minutes. You stop. You look around and the thought occurs to you, “This road doesn’t go anywhere!” This is a backroad.
Of course, just because this road goes nowhere you normally want to be doesn’t mean it doesn’t go anywhere. Somebody probably lives on this road. You might find a young family trying to escape the hectic life of the city or an older couple going about the business of simple farm life they’ve worked all their days. Perhaps you’ll come across a compound of neo-religious zealots with underwear on their heads and automatic weapons… Or maybe a secret government installation where they’re hiding captured space aliens with atomic blasters and underwear on their heads (the space aliens, not the government people, although what they do in their off time is legally none of our business). For the most part, however, you’ll find the people are very friendly. They’ll wave or even stop to converse about the weather or the crops. Unless the backroad you’re on happens to run across the deepest part of their land or you have one of their cattle tied to your hood. For the most part, you’re okay to take the road if there are no signs, gates, concertina wire, flying lead or bomb craters, nuclear or otherwise.
“But what if I get lost?” you quiz. Well, the whole idea is to place yourself in a semi-misplaced state; an aimless exploratory situation in an open and tranquil setting. Getting completely lost would seriously hamper this position so it’s good to have a general concept of where you are or at least how you got there. One way to do this is to leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Aside from being time consuming when done from a vehicle, this has been historically and scientifically proven to be an unreliable method of trail marking by the research team of Dr.’s Hansel, Gretal, Grimm and Grimm.
One of the better methods to use in not getting lost on backroads is a simple understanding of the basic backroad layout and a sense of the directions around you. Your direction of travel can be monitored by use of a standard compass, a tool invented by the Boy Scouts, I think. The placement of backroads in the United States is normally done in a grid pattern of roads around pieces of land in either quarters, sections, uh, halves, townships, dimes or parsecs…maybe. Generally, the further west you travel, the larger the spaces between roads until in places like Montana and west Texas they use road grids which coincide with county lines and time zones. These roads will usually run in a west-east, north-south network unless they are forced to circumvent a natural barrier or landmark such as lakes, rivers, hills, Pike’s Peak or John Goodman.
I should note that government owned land does not necessarily have a layout consistent with the standard grid system. Normally these roads will wander aimlessly, often taking off in a different direction entirely whenever a new administration took over.
If you are still unsure of your ability to remain aware of your location at all times, you may want to acquire a mobile GPS, or Global Positioning System. These devices are wonderful modern appliances which can be purchased quite inexpensively or added to your smart phone via an app. There is no better, faster way to find out just how lost you really are.
Have a nice drive, enjoy America and relax! If you get lost you have a really good reason not to be at work tomorrow.