Paving a road to nowhere

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October 3, 2008

By Janisse Ray The Dalton Daily Citizen Fri Oct 03, 2008, 12:44 PM EDT

I’d rather hear a dentist’s drill than a road-paver.

But most of this week, as fall tenderly arrived, it was the din of road-paving equipment that I endured. Eight machines began paving on the dirt road that runs past my house.

I’ve been trying to understand the desire to lay pavement on the good earth.

When I first returned to the family farm years ago, I was searching for a way of life increasingly rare. I wanted to live connected to land, to weather, to seasons, and to each other. I wanted to shelter my son from the world most American children suffer, which is too much violence, too many screens, too much plastic, too much fast food – and too little emphasis on what matters.

Family matters, history matters, homeland matters, love matters.

When my mother, born in 1939, was a girl, she walked this road to school. She walked it to church at Spring Branch Baptist. She skipped with her brothers to play in Ten Mile Creek. As late as the 1960s, the bridge over the creek was a wooden platform without guard-rails, a rattling affair of loose beams and boards.

Now the wooden bridge is a culvert, and in preparation for paving, dozens of trees on both sides of the old road were cut.

One neighbor wants the road paved. He is a former county commissioner, and every county commissioner in Appling gets a Pave-One-Road-Free card. He chose ours. He said, "Paving is progress – why should we get left behind?"

A paved road is not progress. It is going backwards. Try it. Before long, without looking, you’re arse over teakettle.

Along pavement, quality of life decreases. Traffic goes faster, causing more accidents, more injuries and death. There’s more roadkill. When a country road is ruined, where do people ride horses? Where do I run? Where do kids drive golf carts?

Hilton Baxley Road is 1.1 miles long. It goes nowhere. The pavement will suddenly stop and the road will become dirt again. A third of the neighbors, maybe more, don’t want the asphalt. Some of their land, like ours, was condemned to get it.

When the trees went down, I thought, You wouldn’t want to die in a battle somewhere and go unidentified, dishonored. I walked the easement, measuring. Slash pine, 71 inches. Slash, 52 inches. 72 inches. Water oak, 49 inches. Cedar. Red maple. Wild cherry. I measured dozens and dozens of trees. I touched them. I said I was sorry.

I have spent my entire life – 46 years – trying to redefine "progress." When we cut the trees that our children need to breathe, that’s backwardness. When pavement thwarts the ability of the earth to absorb water, that’s backwardness. When the creek fills with silt and nasty chemicals, that’s backwardness.

I want to give you the really bad news: I’m probably not going to be able to stop this road from being paved.

I want you to know that I tried.

Janisse Ray, author of three books of nature writing, will speak at Middle Georgia College in Cochran on Oct. 6. She lives in Appling County.

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