Stewart Dawson
The Sidetrip to Bible Grove
“The highways were abandoned and travelers kept to the winding path”
(Judges 5:6)
Some days, the driving of miles, like herding cattle to summer pastures, becomes commonplace and tedious. The miles are all the same. The driving even counts the cattle one by one: Mile 311, Mile 310, Mile 309, Mile 308 as if the end of the trail was measured in little green signs of beef. They make the same sounds, they all look the same and they wander by, one after the other, on their way to a distant and untimely slaughterhouse death. Alex wanted to change the cattle into different and more human-like miles that stayed closer to home and didn’t stretch to such distant lengths.
So the roads Alex took had names like E and T and W and M. They were bumpy, rutty little roads but they knew so much more than the super cattle drives. They wandered to places that only their residents would know. Their miles were measured more like the distance a honeybee might go to find the perfect clover and then knowing its own road, find its way back to the hive to tell the other bees just where to go, “through those trees and over the hill!”
Alex found a little sign on one of the roads that split a lovely difference into much smaller sections. The sign had a silhouette of a horse and buggy and it said: “Share the road.” The road traveled hills and curves and one-lane bridges like passages from an Amish bible. The little bridges went over creeks with names like: Bee, Tobin and Long Branch. Some little bridges went over creeks that didn’t seem to have a name at all. He guessed people that lived by them gave them their own names. The roads went where they needed to go and the creeks all flowed like tears down to the great Mississippi and on to the ocean where they would start again. The roads took Alex to places with names like Mahaska and Lebanon and Eldon and Early and Last Chance and Bible Grove. And sometimes they took him to places he needed to go on the way to the places he was going.