July 09 2004, 11:36 PM Pathing

Pick a place and say that you are there; pick the place where you call it home. Pick another place, some distant place, sufficiently distant that it requires the use of the car. I find occasional errands run to a distant shopping center are excellent examples of this sort of thing. Now: pick your route.

Do you opt for the quickness of the freeway, be it real (comfortable flight down clear roadway) or imagined (the long minutes spent merging, looking nervously backward)? The freeway has charms, too, in the easy presentation of options. You may go here, or there. It might be better to be somewhere in between to reach your destination, but the option is not presented, so the selection cannot be optimal. It is easier. I dislike the freeway, for it is fast and fraught with lane changes and angry people who want to be someplace else. I avoid it when I can, and when it makes sense to.

There are other ways to go, sometimes. My own example involves a good bookseller, some miles south of here. It is possible to reach it via the loose alliance of interstate roads, but that does not really get one close. The direct route follows a state road, the kind that saw tremendous development some years ago and still today, the kind that is long, throttling stretches of auto mall and traffic light. I think it is the fastest route, but it is physically exhausting to drive it.

In the years occasional experiments made and maps consulted of offered something of a better way. Zip through a neighborhood or two. Take the bridge over the gridlock, and then wind up and down the hill. Follow the north bank of the river south to the bridge, then take the bridge. Follow the road soft left and hard right, up the river valley. Drive past the airport, drive under the runway. Turn right. Leap the first congested commuter route, then cut a quick left to mingle briefly with the second at the five-way collision of map and asphalt. Veer away, down and to the right, down towards the farms and slower ways. About halfway in, turn to the right on a road the color of the sun, carefully but demurely marked, an otherwise anonymous turning. This is the last of it; after some miles we pop out on the road of the bookstore. It takes perhaps 5 minutes longer, but I arrive refreshed and ready to do battle with the stockpersons.

There are people I know who cling to routes, knowing only thin strip after thin strip of this city, that city, the twin strips of weather grey to go both ways between. I sometimes go get lost on purpose, fighting off the blows of the others in the car. I do it because sometimes it works.