The Dirt Road

Wendell Hodge was an affable man who worked for the Hancock County Department of Roads for twenty-seven years. He raked gravel into level ribbons of highway before the paving crew came along with its steam-driven dreadnoughts to lay asphalt over his careful Zen-like strokes.

He retired at age sixty-six in the piney woods of Mississippi, taking long walks every morning so his feet could stay in touch with the idea of roads—of traveling, of seeing the world, of arriving. He had always regarded himself as a bit of a travel agent.

Every day for five years, his meandering took him down a dirt path to a log cabin, smoke curling up from the chimney and hanging in the air like a corkscrew miasma. Wendell finally knocked on the door one day, and a few times he had the gumption to peek inside, where he saw coffee on the stove, water running in the sink. Once he even heard a soft, lilting tune coming from a music box on the kitchen table, but no one was ever home. He started taking a different route on his constitutionals. The cabin scared him.

Wendell decided to revisit the dirt path five years later, but it was gone. Fifty-year-old pines and hundred-year-old oaks rose from the ground where the path had been. A robin engaged in soliloquy sat on the telephone wire above Wendell’s head.

“The world is full of windows,” the robin declared, interrupting his deep thoughts. “They open and close.”

“Do you mean the cabin wasn’t real?” Wendell asked the philosophical bird.

“The only thing that’s real is the road you’re standing on,” the robin replied. “Reality is always shifting, rearranging, evolving, but the journey never stops.”

Wendell realized that the robin was nothing less than feathered wisdom. Men were born to walk down roads, nothing more. He of all people should have known.

He walked on, but the lilting tune from the music box remained in his mind for the rest of his life.

Pic: public domain