Coded gray.

Saturday 8 September 2001

Dirt road

Pic of the day: End of the road.

Country road ...

It's probably just me. But I feel there's a kind of beauty in this. I followed the road, and as it neared its end I could clearly see the changes. Eventually it grew into a pair of dirty tracks, before fading out near the edge to the wilderness.

This is the kind of road that grows organically. It is much like life itself. It is created and maintained by need, and where the need ends, so does the road. It may not quite end in a dignified way, but in a natural and reasonable one. Not like the broad road along the Dalsfjord a few kilometers from here. It's quite a high standard road for these places, the Dalsfjord road. Too bad, after a grand tunnel, it ends abruptly in the mountainside. Politicians suddenly found out that they wanted to build roads elsewhere instead. That's what happens when things don't grow organically.

***

While I may be no fan of most country music, I am quite fond of the countryside itself. Green growing things and stuff. This is kind of ironic, since I myself am known to have my cacti die. Green thumbs, not this guy. Nor am I the type who loves to trek for days into the mountains and get away from it all. But there is a connection to nature in the country life that is deeper and more genuine than the romantic environmentalism of the city dwellers. The farmers and the workers here, they don't just look at nature like they're in a museum or something. They are part of nature.

We only borrow this place. We are just guests. This may be a purely philosophical concept to the city dweller, but it gets very very real when you walk in the wilderness and see old ruins of houses that were built by earlier generations, but that no longer were needed. The forest grows on old fields, and moss on the foundations. Paths worn deep by generations of people and cattle, now overgrown and partly lost.

But elsewhere, new roads grow longer, and bogs are turned to fields. But we know that it is only for the while. Leave it for a few years, and the true owner of the land claims it back. Nature suffers us in no other way than it does all living things. And when the next ice age has scoured the land here, there will not be stone left on stone of all our works. The blackboard will be wiped clean again. In this perspective, country people don't easily weep for the fate of a deer or an old gnarled tree. All things pass.

***

I don't really feel that I have reached the end of the road myself. No. I know I'm probably past the middle of my life, though I don't know by how much. But I'd like to see it go on for a long time. I love life, in a deep still way rather than with public displays of affection. But I hope when the end of my life draws near, that I can face it with that same acceptance. To see it dwindle as it approaches the end of human influence, like that country road.

It is a funny thing, that the end of the road is also the beginning of the road. It all depends on what way you face.


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago
Two years ago

Visit the Diary Farm for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


I welcome e-mail: itlandm@online.no
Back to my home page.