Roads That Raised Me

There are places you know best by walking them. There are places you know by the way the light falls across them at a certain hour, or by the sound of screen doors shutting, or by the names of people who used to live in houses that now belong to strangers.

And then there are places you know by driving through them.

That’s how I know the county where I grew up.

I know it by the curve of its backroads and the way some places narrow without warning. I know it by the dips and rolls that tell the story of pathways that predate "practical" highway development. I know it by the places where the edges of the road disappear, where the fields press close, where the trees make tunnels of shade, and where the cell signal fades just long enough to make you feel farther from everything than you actually are.

Driving has always been therapeutic for me. Not in the clean, polished way people talk about self-care now, but in the older, quieter sense of the word. The kind of therapy that happens when you put your hands on the wheel, roll the windows down, and let your thoughts stretch out across the road ahead of you.

I honestly think I picked that habit up from my high school sweetheart.

He was a volunteer firefighter and drove a '91 Bronco which may or may not have been how he won me over. It was big, boxy, and entirely impractical in the way that all the best teenage memories are. It smelled like vinyl, dust, motor oil, and summer. It felt like freedom before either of us had any real understanding of what freedom really was or what it cost.

Back then, driving was your only way of getting somewhere. It still is, really, since there’s no public transit between counties. But for me, it was also the first step toward that ever-elusive horizon. My way of getting out and getting away from small-town minds and overlapping social circles. And for the past few years, especially after moving back from Tennessee, the time I spent driving alone was critical to maintaining my mental health.

So there’s a rhythm to driving that I know I’ll miss while I’m away, since my beloved Jeep is still on the East Coast. A language learned by feeling and familiarity. Some of my happiest memories revolve around a vehicle or a drive, and before I left for California, I made sure to commit to memory the sensory experiences that I associate with cruising through my stomping grounds.

The road rising ahead of me in the early morning light. The muddy trail my tires leave after a rain. The greenery around me beginning to deepen from pale yellow-green to rich emerald. I left as summer was starting to unfold, which feels appropriate and unfair in equal measure. The countryside was opening itself up in that familiar way, all bloom and brightness and warm afternoons, and I was leaving before the season had fully said what it came to say.

Still, the smells stay with me.

Honeysuckle and peony. Moist morning earth. The occasional sweetness of warm grass after the sun had been on it awhile. And then, in certain low places, that slightly acrid smell of brackish water and decay, the kind that catches in your throat before you can decide whether you hate it or love it.

Those smells are part of home, too.

I recognize that we like to make nostalgia pretty. We smooth it out and light it from behind. But the place I come from was never only beautiful. It was complicated, uneven, full of ghosts, and sometimes hard to explain. It could be soft and sharp in the same mile. A field of flowers, then a ditch of standing water breeding mosquitos. A golden hillside dotted with a herd of deer, then a road chewed up by weather and neglect, one that could cause you to wreck if you're not careful. A memory that warms you, then one that haunts you.

That is the thing about driving through the place that raised you: The road doesn't let you remember selectively for long.

It gives you the whole thing.

Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem” is just one of the songs I associate with this feeling, though my actual driving playlist leans more ’90s country than anything else. Give me the voices that sound like baseball/football games, gas station deep-fried gizzards, cigarette smoke, and long afternoons on porches. Give me songs that were already old enough to feel permanent by the time I was old enough to need them.

But “Dirt Road Anthem” gets at something I understand. Not just the dirt road itself, but the act of returning to one in your mind. The way a road can become a storage place for younger versions of yourself. The way a song can turn a steering wheel into a time machine.

When I hear it, I don’t think of a party, a truck commercial, or some polished idea of rural life. I think of roads I knew before I knew myself. I think of a Bronco with the windows down. I think of young love and late night escapes, conversations that could only happen in the cab of a truck, and summer air moving through my fingers as I rode shotgun with someone I loved at the wheel.

I think of being young enough to believe that if you kept driving, the answer would eventually appear around the next bend.

Maybe that is why driving still settles me. It gives my restlessness somewhere to go. It lets grief move at a speed I can understand. It gives memory a landscape.

Some people need stillness to think clearly. I’ve often needed motion. Or better yet, a steering wheel and decent speakers. A volume knob and a country station.

When I drove through the county in the weeks before leaving, and when I think about driving through it now, I feel the old map return to my body. I know where the road dips. I know where the gaps and bumps are. I know where the air changes. I know three ways to get to any singular destination within 50 miles of home.

And I know that leaving doesn't mean losing.

Sometimes home is not a house, or a town, or even the people who once made it feel fixed. Sometimes home is the road itself, curving through fields and low water, carrying you past every version of yourself you have been.