Town Crier: Dirt roads

If you drive around the county now, you see twice as many street name signs as before. All the new ones are blue and are to help with 911 response. They are basically names for shared driveways where three or more houses use a common drive. There are some neat names out there like Blackberry Way or Shakespeare Lane. Which reminds me, we got a crummy name that translated from the French basically means “Rotgut” way. I’ve got to get that changed before the in-laws come visit again.

The thing I noticed though is now there are names for “streets” that are not paved. It’s been a long time since we’ve had that around here. The Town Crier remembers a time when getting every road in Whitfield County paved was a stated goal of the community leaders and we all knew that when that goal was reached it would be a mark of modernity and success for our community. Of course that means that at the time there were roads in the county that weren’t paved. Lots of them. And that, youngsters who have never seen or driven on one, is what we call a dirt road.

There was a time when all roads here were dirt roads. In the 1800s and before, the only “paved” roads you were likely to encounter were in port towns by the sea or along big rivers. A place like Savannah would get the ballast stones out of the bottom of ships and use them to pave, or “cobble” the streets. And in old photos I’ve seen of Memphis and Chattanooga, the areas around the river docks were paved with stones to help stabilize the bank for the loaded wagons to service the riverboats. Other than that, roads were dirt and bridges were rare.

There’s something about a dirt road that has more character than a paved road. A paved road is a fairly unchanging thing. Occasionally they get a pothole, but other than that, the only change is slowly watching the yellow stripe down the middle fade away. And the only time a paved road is remotely exciting is when a two-lane curvy stretch gets a new black top and for a short time it’s like one of those twisty-turny roads through the Alps where they film the Mercedes-Benz commercials. But even then the excitement of speeding along and cutting the corners tight grows old from the sameness of the black asphalt.

A dirt road on the other hand, has character and moods, just like a human. It has emotion and personality. Some are gravelly and rough like a grumpy old man. Others are flat and smooth and coax you to go faster like a teenager sitting in the passenger seat. Some are filled with holes and ruts and make you go slow and careful. If you’re driving it’s like solving a puzzle working your way through the hazards. If you’re a passenger it makes you take time to look around and pay attention to your surroundings. And if it’s muddy and water covered, the unpaved road gets your adrenaline going like any good adventure should. Will you, the hero, make it? Or will you get stuck, or worse yet, sink in a mire of quicksand never to be heard of again.

When old jeans were cool

When I was a teen, ripped-up, hole-in-the-knee jeans were cool. You could buy them stone washed-style where rocks were put in with the jeans and tumbled to rough them up. You could buy acid-washed jeans and even jeans that had been taken out and shot with a shotgun to give them ripped up little holes. I would put brand new jeans outside on the porch to get rained on and sun baked for days before I would wear them to school. The coolest jeans I ever saw was a pair my buddy Russ was wearing when he was changing out a car battery and the battery exploded. It burned his hands and face somewhat where it splashed on him, but the skin healed. But the jeans, where the acid had burned through in an abstract sulfuric splash, were a masterpiece. My dad would just look at them and shake his head. “You know, when I was a kid,” he’d say, “we’d do everything we could to not have our jeans look like we were poor.”

My point is this, these days of concrete and asphalt, off-road four-wheeling is a big-time past time. Small fortunes are dished out on four-wheelers and jacked-up jeeps to go find a single-track mudhole through the woods. Now it’s a weekend getaway. Back then, it was just part of getting somewhere.

My grandparents lived on a dirt road for a while. It turned off of Riverbend Road and we would slow down to “leave the pavement,” or “turn off the pavement” or get to the place where “it turns into a dirt road there” or any of several phrases nobody uses much anymore. The road is still there, flat and black, but whenever I look down that way my mind’s eye goes back to the light tan of that stretch that led to their house.

Dust in the wind

A dirt road has a couple of qualities that a paved road can’t. A dirt road can create a feeling of anticipation and it can have a sense of lingering. Both qualities come from the dust. On a paved road, a car just appears over a hill or from around a curve and approaches as only a car, no more and no less. But on a dirt road, if it’s been dry and the wind isn’t too strong, when you’re waiting for someone to come, you see a cloud of dust in the distance. It builds. And as a vehicle comes into sight you can tell from far away how fast it’s going by the turbulence of the dust behind it. If it’s the soldier coming home, the car throws up a cloud behind it like a rocket ship spews smoke. It builds anticipation for the arrival. At the other end of a visit, once the car disappears out of sight, the dust drifts slowly away and then dissipates. There is something to watch after they’ve gone, something to hold on to for just a little bit longer until it dissipates the evidence of their presence like a slow fade out at the end of a movie.

Dust has other qualities though. If you’ve ever been driving on a hot day in July down a road that is no longer dirt, but powder, you know what I mean. As a kid I would look out the back window and pretend I was in a spy car laying out a smoke screen to lose the bad guys, or a jet fighter with afterburners going full blast so the MIGs couldn’t catch me. But if a car was coming the other way, it was roll up the windows time, and I don’t know about your grandfather’s car, but mine didn’t have air conditioning. Whatever cooling breeze the open windows had was suddenly gone and the greenhouse effect kicked in immediately. The dust could hang on the road for a mile if it was in the dead hot calm of the day. By the time the windows could roll down again you felt like you’d served time in “the box” in one of those Southern-fried convict camps like in that movie “Cool Hand Luke” or something. And then my grandfather would have to turn the windshield wipers on to knock the dust off. Don’t squirt the washers though, or you get mud!

Then there were the times when you were behind a car on a dirt road. All of a sudden, you were in a yellow cloud where visibility didn’t extend beyond the hood ornament. If you were in a hurry and the guy in front wasn’t, you were reduced to drifting way back so you could see the road enough to stay on it and then zooming up in the hopes of getting a break to pass him. Just then a car would come from the opposite direction, add its cloud and you would almost have to stop to let the manmade dust storm clear for fear of running off the road. Of course, with dirt roads there wasn’t such a big difference between being on the road or just driving through a plowed field.

When Shugart was dirt

The last road in town I really remember being dirt was Shugart Road, from Tibbs to what is now the bypass at the Rocky Face Exit. This was back in the ’70s and maybe even early ’80s. It was years from being the home of Walmart and Home Depot, which, come to think of it, probably have more asphalt in their combined parking lots than Whitfield County probably had on its roads until 1955. Shugart was a short cut that nobody really wanted to take because it was still dirt with ditches on the side carved out by road graders, which by the way, you don’t see nearly as many as you used to. In the last years of Shugart as a dirt road, sometimes us teens would drive out that way and get going just fast enough to slide around and skid a bit on the loose dirt. I guess that’s the residual “Thunder Road” DNA in any Southern boy. It was fun to fishtail, but at the same time you were always worried about getting gravel scars on your car. 

Dirt roads. Just another one of those things around here that civilization has put an end to. Nobody thinks about it much, and nobody under 30 or so that hasn’t ever driven on a proper dirt road is going to think, “Hey, I wonder what this road would be like without any pavement?”

But on the other hand, there are certain images and experiences, phrases and driving skills that were once the common experience of everyone around here that are now only memories and funny stories. Well, enjoy the paved roads while you can kids, because once they perfect the flying car, you’ll want to tell your grandkids about the quaint fun of driving on a two-lane blacktop.  

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in film and video production.