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.