The road less labeled

I had to go out to Lower Halls Mill Road last week to interview a woman. I glanced at a map before I left, which was my first mistake. Believing the map was my second mistake. Using Google for directions was my third mistake. (Apparently Google doesn't recognize one particular road as a dead end. I was supposed to jump a drainage ditch and two mobile homes and pick it up on the other side.)

But I'm not taking all the heat for my aimless Bedford ramblings. Street signs would have been a major asset. I was on Wheel Road for 20 minutes before I knew what road I was on. I was beginning to feel like a character in a Stephen King movie or an H.P. Lovecraft book, lost in the empty landscape, surrounded by empty houses. The only person I saw, when I stopped for directions, told me "Ya cain't get thar from here," in the sepulchral tones of a Verizon "Dead Zone" commercial.

It reminded me of my stay in lower Alabama and the mythological town of Loango. Loango was like Xanadu or Shangri-la in that you could only find it if you were looking for someplace else. All similarities between Loango and beautiful, misty and idyllic movie utopias end there (and the similarities to Deliverance begin.)

Then I decided the county was just playing an early April Fools' joke -- or they never put the street signs back after last year's.

What really happens, of course, is that the signs get stolen as often as they go missing, and are expensive to replace. In a perfect world with perfect irony in action, the sign thieves would find themselves in an emergency and no responder would be able to find them because, well, they stole all the signs.

There is an upside to getting lost, of course. When you get lost on back country roads, you get to see things you wouldn't on a four-lane. You know what I'm talking about -- charming old houses with the redbuds blooming in full force; farmers nodding to you as you pass on the road; ancient homesteads whose only evidence of a former life is a burned-out chimney jutting through the kudzu; and the occasional meth lab and pit-bull cockfighting crossbreeding experiment.

I swear, that was the meanest darn chicken I have ever seen.

I don't believe there is such a thing as pure progress. I think for every new thing we learn, we lose something else of equal importance. While I love being able to zip from my home in Tullahoma to work in 20 minutes, I realize that the four-lane and the automobile are killing off the tiny, interesting communities that were tucked away on dirt roads and in hidden hollows. Of course, increased mobility does mean those living there can hunt for spouses somewhere beyond the family tree.

But I love the tiny towns and the characters who made them, and made them special -- especially their names. I've done stories on Hoodoo and Pocahontas, Bucksnort and Bug Tussle, and I've found at least seven Salems in Tennessee. That's a lot of Salems ... or should I say ... Salems Lot. (Oh, quit groaning, You knew it was coming.)

I was looking up some horse shows on the internet because between cats, kids, camping, husband, work, laundry, Marx Brothers marathons, raking leaves and playing World Monopoly on Pogo, I really don't have enough to do to fill my days off. (Just kidding about the raking leaves and laundry. I devote my energy to making others rake leaves and do laundry. It's called delegation, or Mom Rules.)

I found one horse show being held in Boring, Ore., a tiny, unincorporated community between Portland and Mt. Hood that supplies the country with Boring strawberries and Boring Bark.

Oh, the jokes were too easy, especially after I went to a web site, one of those City Search sites where they list the link categories down the side with the name of the town in front of each category. You know: Shelbyville Real Estate. Shelbyville Doctors. Shelbyville government.

Only in this case, it was "Boring Attractions. Boring History. Boring jobs."

Intrigued, and wanting to know how much of a sense of humor the Boring residents had about their Boring community, I visited a few blogs. One of them invited current or former residents to join in with their own blogs and told them, "Please include some contact information so that we can contact you regarding your Boring story." Yes, they have a delightful sense of humor about their community's name, and if I ever get out to Oregon, I'm going to make a point of taking a Boring trip up the coast. Of course, being me, I'll probably get lost and finally find Lower Halls Mill Road instead.

You think Bedford County has trouble with street signs being stolen -- can you imagine how much trouble they have replacing Boring Drive?

­-- Mary Reeves is a staff writer for the Times-Gazette. She can be reached by e-mail at mreeves@t-g.com