Slow Travel

I’ve been on the road a lot this month, some of it on hauls back and forth to Houston. Most of it, though, on the backroads of our county.

Slow travel has come to interest me.

Most of us think slow travel means traffic jams, or at the least a maze of construction lane changes and orange cones. But I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about the slow travel we can choose.

Where we can notice the stage of bloom achieved by thistles. You know, that miniature prickly-pineapple look before the first soft fluff of pale purple bloom.

Where we can notice the abundance of coreopsis or how thistles snuggle into stands of Indian Blanket.

Traveling slowly, we notice the ditch lilies that appear after rain, their often drooping blooms in muted red-violet and cream.

And before the mowing blades move to their slaughter, we take note of where the grass along the verge shifts from muhly to bluestem, to johnson or dallis.

Slow travel gives us the blue heron that likes to fish at dusk in the shallow pond we pass on Klatt Road. Sometimes we note this fisherbird is white, a great egret.

Spring adds to the pleasure of the scene when the willows that rim the pond feather the air with a ferny green.

Slow travel can also save a life. We can easily stop to avoid the fawn in the middle of the road, giving it time to join its mother in the pasture up ahead. Slow travel allows you not to have hit the fawn before you notice it’s there.

And if you are inclined, it allows you to stop to help the turtle cross the road during those weeks when every such reptile is on the move. Her progeny thank you.

Who doesn’t thank you for slow travel is most likely every pickup driver in the county. Our roads are narrow, so it takes awhile to find a place to pull over.

I do apologize for that, but I try to pick the less traveled county roads where I can. And I want the speedy driver to move along, leaving me and my dog to our open windows and the natural music they allow.

Meadowlarks, mostly—that wild, free sound. One of the last in this part of our state that is losing all remnants of wildness faster than a gravel truck can hurtle down a once peaceful road.

The real, best purpose of slow travel, you see, is the way it allows your heartbeat to slow. Your breathing to become regular. Anxieties that seem to be the consistent measure of recent days just lift away with the ease of that meadowlark or scissortail levitating from a wire.

We are still a pretty landscape, with rolling pastures and singleton oak trees that give shade to cattle in the rising heat. Our creeks and low areas are still thick with trees, bushes, briars, the variegated understory. From a high place you can see their painterly green curves inscribing the contours of our hills.

But we should hurry in our effort to appreciate and notice them. Hurry to travel slowly. Because our world contracts with every subdivision that destroys a pasture. Every shopping mecca with its parking lot.

And the destruction is of something even more fragile than a neighborhood, or an ecology. It’s that feeling when you turn off the Greenvine Road at High Star Farm and your heart, tight as a nubbin inside you, opens. And it is your soul that lifts and soars across the fields to the horizon.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com Her new book, This Familiar Heart, is available at the Fayette County Record office and bookstores, on and offline, everywhere.