Velocity has everything to do with awareness. The faster one drives, for example, the less one is apt to see, and then after awhile, the less one looks. A pattern emerges and intensifies while the looking ebbs away, and the road, the gas pedal and the clock become the sum total of the commuter experience.
As the years go by, I notice a significant increase in the number of cars passing by my farm every day, and a noticeable increase in their speed. Formerly, you would see mainly trucks, working trucks, not status symbol trucks. Trucks hauling lumber, firewood, hay, farm animals. And a fair number of jalopies too, sailing by slowly. There is a soft spot in my heart for jalopies, as I happen to be a lifelong jalopy driver myself, and proud of it. My speedometer rarely tops 25 on the dirt roads around here. I can survey my surroundings safely at that speed, and see how the neighbors are coming along with their woodshed building project. Also my old truck is less likely to shake to pieces at lower speeds. As a consequence I have seen a great deal, helped the odd turtle to cross the road, avoided crashing into a newly fallen tree, ushered a grouse and her chicks to safety.
These days I see mostly newish SUVs, Jeepy type things and a few electric cars, people on their way to work presumably, judging from the concentration in numbers around 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. They are all speeding. Looking straight ahead, foot pressing on the pedal. This is a dirt road, open and clear. There’s nothing really to stop them or slow them down, so away they go.
I understand that people are moving to the country to get away from the rush. I might have done the same, had I not started out here (full disclosure, age 6). The trouble is that these folks often inadvertently bring the rush with them. That speed, and the consciousness which comes with it invariably erodes the rural landscape, the manifestation of a slower more natural pace, and a simpler way of life.
I’m pointing this out just now, having learned of a recent fatality of a man in Thetford, killed by a motorist as he was out for a walk. He happed to be one of my schoolmates, from the age of seven all the way through twelfth grade. A more gentle and honorable fellow you are not likely to find. Such an extremely sad and needless death.
As a way to honor his life, I am asking you folks who buzz along our rural roads to slow down, recognize that your trajectory cuts through a living breathing landscape. We, your neighbors, friends and fellow citizens live in these landscapes. Here is where we walk our dogs, where we cross each day to reach our mailboxes, places where livestock cross, perhaps on a misty morning, where young mothers push their baby carriages, where kids ride their horses, where all manor of birds come to peck a bit of gravel, where frogs and snakes do their commuting, where of a June dawn, a doe may be slowly coaxing her spotted fawn along.
Boundless life teams all around us in the rural landscape, we are merely one species of many. To share this place, to care for this place, gives everyone a better chance to stay. Adding ten minutes to your commute time, and shaving 10 mph off your habitual speed will save lives, and allow you to savor yours.
You may start to see things, beautiful things. Where the deer and moose like to cross by the bushy apple tree, where the owl and the red tailed hawk rest on the highest branch of that old dead elm beyond the poplar grove. And when you get to where you’re going, you may have a story to tell which lifts a spirit or two.