Country Road Program

I don't know quite how I started my life as a nostalgia monger so early. But one possible explanation is my love of a few specific winding country road and accompanying tattered barns and roaming livestock. I have watched as these favorite roads of mine have rapidly been eroded by the incursion of the suburban impulse in the form of million dollar zero property line housing. Yes, I am bitter.

My answer? Much like the push towards National Parks early last century I think we should attempt to maintain elements of the world around us that one might call Americana. I don't want to see the landscape of my home town become ubiquitous. I would to see the retention of stratification of time and use. This can even include the new business parks, but it should leave space for the other elements as well.

In my crazy mind's eye I would love to see the development of an interconnected system of trails--on the scale of dirt roads--that criss-crossed the country. I sense an ever growing divide between efficiency and leisure. If you have ever been on a windy mountain road behind a camper RV and were in a hurry you know what I mean. It seems to me that one could develop a set of low maintenance roads for the slow moving and the roaming. These could house all of the RV traffic and could incorporate campsites and all. I would be interested to see how purely recreational roads got used by the public. Perhaps they would be all too crowded. But they would have built into their very inception a slow meandering pace, such that people should only come to them if they aren't going to be frustrated by the slow moving.

Again, I am stuck in my own anachronistic box that I am sure many people don't even share the slightest interest in. But I know there are plenty of people as well who are deadly interested in carving out a niche away from the world as it is. Deadly.