Take the backroads home…

It wasn’t long after I got my driver’s license that I started exploring every single last back country road. We were never more than a two-vehicle family, but I drove dad’s ’77 Chevy pick-up to and from school, youth group, dates, and all kinds of trouble that a high school kid could get into. I knew my way around many of these roads closer to home because they were the roads we traveled to grandparents, picking apples with gramps, mushroom hunting, getting the Christmas tree, riding the school bus, and so on and so on. A college kid recently told me he had to get directions from Siri the first day he drove to high school because he never paid attention while riding with his older siblings. Shaking my head.

The most familiar country road was a short three mile stretch between our truck stop and the east side of LaPaz. I should say here that LaPaz is a tiny burg of about 500 souls. The road ran past my grandparents’ house, past the hay barn, through the swamps, past what was once the little village of East LaPaz, over the former Vandalia Railroad, and then joined Vandalia Street leading east out of town. It was the way we took to the bank, post office, our old elementary school, and for a short time, the local grocery. I rode that stretch on the school bus and in the back of grandpa’s truck on the way to pick up feed at the grain elevator. It’s the road I took with my cousins and attempted to walk uptown to get candy, but pooped out and had to wait at Doc Wackerle’s office for grandma to come get us. Our 7 through 10 year old legs had tired. It’s the road I think of when I hear John Denver’s Country Roads. It’s the road I wrote a poem about in “the road I travel”. It was the road that was forever cut off with yet another mark of progress by the new, new US 31 as it bypassed LaPaz on its east side in 2012 after having wreaked havoc being four-laned through town in the 1950s, now leaving a ghost town in its wake.

I belonged to a family that had the philosophy that if the church doors were open, that’s where we should be. So every single Sunday night, barring a blizzard, that’s where we were. I learned that we couldn’t go to services without wearing my church shoes, so there were several attempts to hide my church shoes as a way to sabotage going to Sunday night services, which always seemed to go long, like mini-revival services. And church was nearly a half hour away in South Bend.

A redeeming part of Sunday night church was the possibility of going out for supper afterward. If that didn’t work, we’d beg to take the back way home, even better yet, to go over the spook bridge west of town. The spook bridge, a name my dad coined I think, was one of the tallest and longest spans in our county. The steel bridge carried Oak Road over the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks below. The B&O came through the top tier of the county in 1873, which prompted the founding of our little town of LaPaz. The old bridge seemed frightening in its own right because the steep incline of upward flanking bents before the bridge leveled off. It was probably built in the late 1890s or so. It was replaced while I was in college, evidently deemed unsafe. Sure, many of the wood floor boards had failed, and sure, the steel guard railings were low enough one could easily sit and hang your legs over the edge. If we were lucky, on our way home from church, we’d take that alternate route and slowly climb up the spook bridge with our windows down and then come to a stop on top as dad relayed stories of people who drowned in the nearby clay pits and effigies hung from the railings to shock passing trains below. It was wonderful being frightened in that way, whether or not the stories were true was irrelevant. Gramps had taken dad over the bridge with the same stories, as he took us over, and as I took our kids over-though it was a different, regulation-favored bridge.

Teenagers today don’t experience these strange travels on our backroads so much. With my high school friends scattered through much of the county, I found myself exploring often. But this back road with the spook bridge wasn’t far from home, and so, my friends and I…I often was the driver….found ourselves on the spook bridge often. I recall a moment of life imitating art once when I drove the Chevy pickup onto the bridge on a hot summer night, pulled a six pack of cold Cokes from the back and then, sat on those railings with a few buddies as we gazed back into our little town a mile away. The warmth of sodium lights lighting up the large grain elevator that stood like a castle over the railroad, and the lights that still shown on my old school, now gone, whose tower popped up above the tree line. We sat there, laughing, dangerously perched above the rails some fifty feet below, and then John Cougar Mellencamp came on the am radio singing about my small town, that one we were looking back at.

One of these buddies was an instigator who drove race cars. There was a narrow gravel road that led from just south of the bridge into the west edge of town. It passed the blueberry plantations growing on old wetlands that were drained, the narrow ditches now forming the headwaters for Brush Creek, which flows along the west edge of our pasture. This gravel road had two sharp turns within a few hundred feet of each other. These are formally known as Michigan Road Land Section corrections which are only located along Old US 31/Michigan Road between about Fulton, Indiana and Lakeville, Indiana. It was in this corridor that sections of land were surveyed and sold for the construction of the Michigan Road in the early 1830s. Because these lands were sectioned off prior to fuller surveys of counties, the section lines didn’t line up then with the sections to each side, but, in order to align roads on section lines, the roads were required to have abrupt right angle turns. Sometimes these are 100 feet or a few hundred feet apart. The blueberry plantation road’s correction turns were far enough apart to allow one to build up speed and complete what my racecar driver friend called “hole-shots” where one would take the curve, step on the gas, and throw gravel out of the hole like gunshot….hence, hole-shot. The beauty was to be able to do this in repetition on the graveled plantation road because of repeating, right angle turns. The old Chevy pick-up performed hole-shots very well.

I commuted to classes at Bethel College, having purchased a white Pontiac Grand Am using some of the cash tucked into my graduation cards. When I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, I drove one of two parallel back routes with US31, home. One was Oak Road, which led down from the Sumption Prairie area on the southwest side of South Bend. The other was Miami Trail, which led from the southeast side of South Bend due south in the general vicinity of Bremen. Oak Road was a more substantial detour for me, but Miami was often my routine for staying off 31. Miami Trail was, as the name implies, a trail used by the Miamis long before the days of white men driving Pontiacs. The road has some subtle curves but is a beautiful drive with large, historic farms. It also rides the ridge, for some distance, of the north-south continental divide shaping the division of waters running into the Great Lakes versus into rivers that eventually go to the Gulf of Mexico. From Miami Trail, I turned at Huff’s Cemetery at a four-way stop, and headed west on First Road, passing my grandparents old farm on muck land they had used to grow mint-even having their own mint distillery. This route put me just east of home, having managed to avoid highways for all but the last half mile. Often were the times that I would roll my windows down, turn the radio up, and chomp away at a crisp yellow delicious apple from the bag I picked up at Mac’s Market in LaPaz. Still today, some songs will take me back to that drive and my mouth waters thinking of apples.

That other route, down from Sumption Prairie onto Oak Road, rose in my routine of staying off 31 while I attended Andrews University in Michigan. It was an easy off-ramp for me while driving the 31 bypass around the southwest side of South Bend, coming down from Michigan. I could both jump off at Mayflower Road or State Road 23 and continue onto my route. The route to Sumption Prairie is a very old road, leading southwest out of South Bend to a loosely organized community of old farms, a few churches, a school, and even a post office at one time, on some very rich agricultural land, which, as the name implies, was a prairie. The prairie takes its name from the first to settle in the area, Mr. George Sumption, who cut and stacked logs for a cabin on the prairie in 1830. The route, like many routes prior to formal organization of county roads, has sweeping curves and some fabulous old homes built before the Civil War. The curves end and the road takes a direct south route at Sumption Prairie Cemetery, but goes up and down over hill and vale, through some old growth forests and past Potato Creek State Park’s east boundary.

The Oak Road route was one our family would occasionally take home from Potato Creek where we would go for small family picnics or just drive through late Saturday afternoons to look for deer. That seems so strange now when I see deer out my window on a daily basis. Potato Creek was established in the mid-1970s, but had been lobbied for for a number of years. The creek was dammed and a lake created as the focal point to the park. It consumed old family farms, including one of my ancestral farms, and wraps into its boundaries a cemetery in which they are interred. That Oak Road route also passes two other cemeteries in which family members rest, a fact that I only more recently became aware of.

I still came home from Andrews on the weekends to help work at the truck stop on Fridays and Saturdays. Andrews rarely had classes on Fridays after noon and never had functions on Saturdays because of it being Seventh Day Adventist. I was rarely in a rush on Friday afternoons, so Sumption Prairie to Oak Road was my go-to route. By my last year at Andrews, because of a stash of cash I had accumulated the summer before, I went a little crazy and bought a new black Mustang GT. It handled terribly on snowy roads, but was a real joy to drive both fast on highways and slow down county roads. And the stereo was incredible. It was about that time that the old spook bridge was deemed unsafe and removed, and the road closed for a period of years.

So my detour detoured me again down First Road, my most familiar route.

Testing the Water as a podcaster?

A year ago I considered diving into the world of podcasts with a folksy-Hoosier travel sort of theme. I have about a dozen stories written and thought I'd test the water with content dropped onto my blog...something I haven't been back to in more than two years. I plan to drop these stories maybe twice a month on Sundays. What follows is the opener.

I don’t think one sets out to start a podcast, much like one doesn’t typically set out to write a book. It seems like the book finds them, or in this case, the podcast. I used to blog, a lot, and had a whopping dozen or so followers. I used that more as therapy than anything, but it pulled together my love of Indiana, history, and our natural landscape into folksy tales. Hoosier Happenings, the name of the blog, peaked as my business began to take off and time no longer permitted writing. The blog sprinkled in politics and faith, the therapeutic part, but since both have drawn such hard lines in the sand these days, I’ll probably pass on including much of that here.

I grew up just outside a town of about 500 people in Northern Indiana. I was within eyeshot of my grandparents’ farm, our business-a truck stop, and my uncle’s house. I packed my wagon one time and ran away to my grandparents. Maybe twice. I was the middle child and prone to do that. Our life was really the truck stop. My grandparents built it, but five generations were part of it. After World War II, they traded their small farm for a restaurant at the corner of old 31 and 6, then in 1956, they rebuilt it down the road when old 31 became a four-lane. Ultimately, competition by chains and rerouting of traffic caused my folks to close the business. I mention this backdrop to my life because I think it played a role in the formation of my longing for the road and mom and pop shops that represent life in Indiana, well, the best of life in Indiana.

School was also small town. That small town of 500 specifically. It was the oldest building I experienced on a regular basis, built as a consolidated township school in the 1920s. There was an older part, from the late 1800s, that had a creepy basement and tower that were fodder for some outlandish stories I would create. One I told in First Grade, to my little friends who didn’t know better, was that I was kidnapped and raised by Native Americans and that I still carried a scar they gave me to identify me as one of the tribe. Conveniently, I was able to point to a birthmark on my side during recess to prove it. This was the start of my story telling. Then my sister was caught with cigarettes and my folks decided that we were to be protected from the world and sent to a small Christian school, from which I graduated. But if anything was not small town, it was our regular Sunday routine. Our family, among many others, left that small town’s church and began attending a, well, mega-church for its time, in South Bend. The church was Charismatic. This is the background that shaped my faith, which will, without intention, come through in this chronology.

One other piece to the puzzle of my past is that love for Indiana born out of seeing a model of one of the best Hoosiers that has ever graced this state. My mom’s dad died while I was young. I wish I had known him much longer because not only do I look a great deal like him, we shared similar interests and seem to share a quiet demeanor and personality. However, my grandma remarried former Indiana Governor Otis Bowen, who had been our family physician in another small town-Bremen. Of the grand, grand old party, I saw what public service, modeled by a true servant, truly looked like. He’s been called Indiana’s favorite son. While many today do not know him, I can tell you he was that. He loved Indiana and it loved him back. He may have been a Republican, but his blood ran Hoosier which is not true of our politicians today. Statesman is no longer in our vocabulary. This backdrop of statesmanship influenced me maybe more powerfully than anything else for my life ahead.

My first love was architecture. I remember sketching building plans while I stayed with my grandpa after grandma died when I was 13 years old. I still have that sketchbook. But business and finance also interested me, so I landed on that after high school. But as my time in college grew to a close, and life’s plans changed with a break-up, I went on to architecture school and all the gears began to work in my head. History, mostly related to my family roots, was still important to me as was the idea of landing in Indiana after college. So, a few months before I walked to get my diploma, I scanned architectural firms in Indiana and picked out a dozen from Evansville to Elkhart that seemed to fit my interests. However, I had also met the principal of a firm located in my hometown through a charter leadership class we were both in. And he was hiring. And so fulfilled the dream of returning to my small town Indiana hometown.

I met my wife in a coffee shop downtown. We bought a house on main street, and brought two little ones home from the hospital to this slice of Americana. While yet in high school, I got engaged in politics which morphed and continued into elected office, both on city council and as a county commissioner. I also worked with others in starting non-profits, some history and some travel-related, over the course of the following years.

I drove our architecture firm’s historic preservation focus, and becoming self-taught in the ways of understanding, well, how to “see” history and the standing reminders left by those who came before us. And I began to see my life’s work as a way to honor those, and carry our history forward as a steward of Indiana’s legacy. And it should be no surprise, then, when I went out on my own, that approach became my focus. To-date, besides traveling endlessly across the state, I’ve worked in more than three-quarters of her counties and have gotten to know the very best Hoosiers.

I enjoy kayaking and am trying to tackle all of Indiana’s most prominent rivers. Sugar Creek is foremost for me, but I’ve also spent time on the Flatrock, Eel, Yellow, Wildcat, Tippecanoe, Whitewater, and Kankakee. I enjoy hiking through the woods, while my wife enjoys the beach. I’ve often said to folks, you can keep the beach, drive me out to some remote forest and dump me out and I will have found heaven. Backpacking stints on the Appalachian Trail and North Woods Trail also informed me I have my limits. I dabble in photography and often have to disconnect my “documentation” mode in order to capture the “artsy” shots, as my friends say. Much of my subject matter comes from everything mentioned above, as well as that love for country roads. One day I hope to have a gallery to display these photos-in conjunction with an office slightly larger than the closet I am in now.

Today, after a decade and a half in business, after buying a farmstead in the country we call Sycamore Hill, and restoring the same, after the kids have grown up and now attend colleges-both in-state, after switching to a more traditional church befitting my own faith journey, and after another stint in public office that made me realize there’s very little redeeming hope for that desire any longer, after all that…I’m looking for another challenge.

I wrote a piece once about an existential moment I had while visiting a historic site, then posted it on my blog. That’s when I realized that there was something bigger and deeper going on here than just me taking a check for services. I realized that Indiana was presenting her stories to me, if I just listened, and that my love for the state allowed me to interpret them for others. That was almost 10 years ago.

With an increasing portfolio of these stories, and my Facebook posts about them, people have suggested I write a book. That may follow. I suppose the book would write itself, but I feel as though the stories will be ongoing, they aren’t finite to the extent that I can type THE END to anything just yet. So this venue seems the best, at least for now.

You’ll see a common theme in the stories. Traveling backroads, my experiences with historic sites, our state’s rivers, some of my family connections to sites, the small towns, all of these will be woven together to, hopefully, make you feel like you’re on the journey too.

I share my background as the backdrop to how the stories are told. To give context to the stories. To hopefully help you see what I see when I travel Indiana so that you feel like you’re there with me. This is no small challenge, because if we don’t travel and feel these places together, we will have missed the point altogether.