“I’m from a pretty rural area,” I tell my new acquaintances. After a polite pause, I elucidate: “Half of my parents’ street is dirt.” Eyebrows raise. Appropriate expressions of surprise are uttered. And my childhood home is thus explained in one or three words: Rural. Dirt road. They’re not bad words, but they don’t give a quarter of the picture I had hoped to paint in my acquaintances’ minds.
My rural eastern Massachusetts experience is not the same as other people’s rural experiences. I have not lived in poverty. I am not surrounded mainly by those who work farms for their livelihoods. I do not have old-growth forests surrounding me. In fact, rural might be the wrong word; the word I’m looking for is probably closer to pastoral.
“Pastoral Massachusetts”, then.
When I walk on Jewett Street, I walk by two horse paddocks and three cow pastures, not to mention the hay field by the pond. I walk past a beaver pond. I walk through what counts as a densely forested area for these former farmlands. The stone walls demarcating old boundary lines between one man’s land and another’s still stand, reminding me of how difficult it is to undo the work of ages past.
When I walk on Jewett Street, I pass my former selves on its gentle curves. There, by the beaver pond, is a pair of twelve year-old friends, studying through a magnifying glass the tadpoles they caught in an old ice cube tray given to them for that purpose. There, by my parents’ mailbox, is the eight year-old who decided she would run away (sans a bag, a coat, and any form of footwear). She didn’t get out of sight of the house before deciding she would rather have dinner than eat on the lam. Further down, towards the swampy area, she rides bicycles with her brother all the way to the town library, something like a four and a half mile trip both ways.
It is true that half my road is dirt. Bearing right off Main Street/State Highway 113 as you leave town center, Jewett is paved like most streets in my town are. No sidewalks, no lines. You count yourself lucky if you have the light of a streetlight or two as you pass through the swampy areas. (It’s no fun to hit a possum or a turtle that decides to make a last-minute dash across the road.) But as you ride up the hill, past the house that is rumored to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad, past the house the Orthodox priest used to live in, you suddenly find the road under your wheels bumpy and loud. That’s when you know you’ve hit dirt Jewett.
They’ve tried to get the town to pave that last mile of Jewett Street, some of the neighbors further down closer to the beaver pond. They even got a town meeting to be called about it, and eventually were shut down for good because—and I kid you not—the beaver pond and its environs are home to an endangered species of newt. Paving could endanger the habitat of these little two-inch, orange-bodied, blue-dotted creatures my siblings and I used to catch in our front yard. That such small beings should hold up the road improvements planned by their superiors (in height at least, if not in good sense) tells me that the Greater Power Above has some sense of humor.
I’ve been walking dirt Jewett Street on my morning jogs and walks. Depending on which way you turn out of the driveway, it’s either the beginning or the end of what we in the DiTullio family call The Loop. I like to go so that I end with dirt Jewett. Something about the pond, with its three beaver lodges and eternal war between the beavers and the public water department (that’s a story for another post, I promise), appeals to me. The beavers have, over the years, turned a marshy area into a full-blown nature preserve. It’s a peaceful place to me, and has the feel of a backwoods retreat. It’s a nice way to end my exercise.
Perhaps it’s the endorphins from my run, or the cool morning air going to my head, but sometimes I swear I can actually see a twelve-year-old girl, crouched over an ice cube tray with her friend. They are oblivious to me, as they well should be. The magic of that discovery, that wonder at the world, seems to pass from her heart to mine, and I bounce a little more lightly back to my parents’ house on those mornings.
Is it any wonder these roads, these fields, these ponds and marshes, are some of my happiest places in the world?
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