Life on South Kansas Road

When U.S. 30 cut a four lane swath through Wayne County, Ohio, things changed on South Kansas Road. Before, we could drive north to the Lincoln Highway and turn right or left. Now we can only turn left. If we want to go right (east), we have to take a less direct route. It's annoying when I forget and end up driving to the first exit on New Route 30--several miles out of the way--only to go back where I've come from and start over. Traffic that used to whiz by our house on South Kansas has diminished, too. Our road is no longer the most accessible path for carpentry, plumbing and roofing crews who are headed for the next county. Now, Amish-made furniture vans find other routes to get "down south" to Holmes County.

New Route 30 makes me both happy and sad. I guess I'm happy for the ability to quickly commute to the stores on the north end of Wooster where I can browse in a new Pier 1 and Kohls. But I still remember seeing a dead Canada Goose on a once-quiet road where the construction crews were working. I feel sad about lost farmlands and fields--the loss of the beautiful natural terrain of Ohio's rolling hills. This land will never look the same. It has been disturbed. For every square foot of paved-over land, there is a corresponding change in the flow of ground water. The sponge and clay of the earth's surface has been sealed off forever. I wonder if the land feels suffocated by all this asphalt.

Someone pointed out that this latest version of the Lincoln Highway--U.S. #30--is the third. If I try, I can find small remains of the oldest 30. The next one is still accessible but I'll probably only go that way when I want to visit one of the small businesses. They will no doubt struggle to stay alive with fewer potential drive-by customers on a daily basis. From New 30, I see the backs of buildings I recognized before only from the front. I drive over new bridges that span roads on which I still travel. I'm denied access where the new road is still under construction. I have no choice but to accept the new road with its limitations and its expansion. Eminent domain has re-shaped my landscape.

Terry Tempest Williams once said that one of the most radical acts in our time might be to stay at home. Of course, I heard her talk about this at a lecture at the College of Wooster--thousands of miles from her native Utah! But she has a point. Every day we make choices about where we go, which roads we travel and how we get to where we're going. Maybe it's truly a radical thing I'm doing--staying home more, shopping close to home and learning to appreciate the wealth of my own back yard.

It was a girl named Dorothy who said: "We're not in Kansas anymore..." Only after some adventures on the yellow brick road, did she really understand what mattered most. "We're home, Toto, we're home."