By Neal Wooten
When I was a kid on Sand Mountain, it seemed like half the roads in the county were dirt roads. I can still hear the small rocks from the chert kicking up and hitting the underside of the car. I remember the small, one-lane, wooden bridges and how the bus drivers had to creep across most of them.
My memories of my childhood are filled with dirt roads. I can remember running all the way to Granny’s house on our dirt road, or playing with my dogs, or filling bottles with sand, and often playing tag, dodgeball, or flies and skinners with cousins on the dirt road.
You could always tell when someone was coming from the billow of brown clouds kicking up behind them as they sped along. And you could always find tracks out the dirt road of animals or my big flat Fred Flintstone feet. And I had fun cutting donuts with my motorcycle. I loved to ride over the rollercoaster hills of Bobo Hollow (Holler) or come up the mountain along the winding dirt road around the Hole in the Rock. I think that road is closed now.
When it would rain hard, which is often on the mountain, the runoff would be too fast for the culvert, and it would wash out our dirt road, leaving a huge rut that ran from one side of the road to the other. We would just have to go very slow and ease through it. Eventually, the road grader would come and make it better, at least until the next heavy rain. I guess road graders are fading away with the dirt roads.
We just don’t see dirt roads like we used to on the mountain. Even my Mom’s road is gravel now. I know progress is a good thing, and paved roads are much nicer than the old dirt roads, don’t wash away, and are probably a lot safer, but it just seems like another tiny bit of Americana is disappearing with them. Old dirt roads just seem like part of the landscape of the rural South to me. There are even countless country music songs about dirt roads.
I guess, like other things, dirt roads will eventually only live on in our memories. It might not be too long before there are none in the entire county, and we’ll seem like old mountain folks when we try to explain about them to the younger generation, i.e., the little whippersnappers. Who knows, every kind of road might one day become a thing of the past as automobiles hover above ground.
“Take me home, hovercar” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
