Alan Liere: Driving the Back Roads

I like to drive the back roads in farm country each spring. My family used to call it “getting lost in the country,” but I say it is impossible to get lost as long as you stay in your vehicle.

“Daddy, are we lost?” my children used to ask me.

“Heck no,” I’d say, rolling down the window. “Can’t you see we’re right here by this big wheat field?” When they were four and seven, that was good enough.

Once, we almost got lost, but then I saw a sign that said “Spokane: 59 miles.”

“See?” I told my anxious wife. “We’re not lost. Spokane is only an hour from here.” I think she would have been more impressed had we not set out two hours earlier from Spokane to get ice cream cones 12 miles away at the Clayton Drive-In.

On a recent drive, a friend and I hung a left just south of town and headed east. Before long, the country opened up with winter wheat on both sides and gravel beneath us.

Sometimes, a sign warned us there was a primitive road ahead, but if it went somewhere we had never been, we took it. As far as I could tell, the only difference between a primitive road and a road in town was that on a primitive road you aren’t so surprised by the potholes.

Mostly, my friend and I just putzed slowly along looking for wildlife. We observed a variety of dwellings ranging from nicely maintained ranchers to dilapidated homes where the occupants had never been to the dump and had kept every vehicle they ever owned.

One of these in particular was a monument to the human instinct to hoard, with acres and acres of plastic milk jugs, tires, and rusted metal cluttering what could have been a beautiful streamside location. A big cock pheasant strolled among the garbage – out of character, I thought, for such a magnificent bird.

“Why do people take a beautiful piece of property and do that to it?” I asked.

“I suspect they think they might need that stuff some day,” my friend replied. “Their slice of paradise is different than yours.”

“Their slice offends me,” I said.

“I figured it would,” my friend replied.

Eventually, our ride in the country turned into a dialogue on lifestyles, as well as reflections on human tendencies and motivations. There were lots of little farm houses tucked between newly plowed wheat land, some occupied, some long abandoned.

What tragedy or turn of events had caused the owners to leave such idyllic settings? Had these people finally found their slice of paradise elsewhere? While I had pined for a rural lifestyle, had they dreamed of city lights?

I asked my friend why she thought no one had snapped these houses up.

“I imagine they are part of the family farm,” she said. “They can’t sell the house without selling the land, too, and no one wants to do that.”

She was probably right, but that’s a dollar and cents evaluation, and I lean more towards intrigue and romance. Had she asked me, I would have speculated about lost love, tragedy, and the unhappy ghosts that haunted the farmsteads. She always sees a lot more wildlife than I do when we drive back roads in the spring, but I think I get a lot more out of the drives than she does.