The Old Roads

Before the interstates rearranged the country's sense of distance, the roads were the journey and the journey was the point, and the people who drove them were not passing through so much as arriving, repeatedly, at the same filling stations and county seats and river crossings that their parents had stopped at before them. Those routes still exist, most of them, running parallel to the fast roads or threading through the hill country the engineers found it easier to go around, and the towns along them have been holding down their end of the arrangement for longer than any bypass has been open. The regulars who know them will tell you, without much prompting, that the correct way to cover any of them is slowly, which is the only instruction this issue needs to give before the roads speak for themselves.

What the old roads offer that the interstates do not is proportion, the sense that the distance between two places is a real thing with texture and duration, not a number to be reduced. The hills are honest on these routes and the curves are genuine and the small detour that looked optional on the map has a way of becoming, by late afternoon, the reason for the whole trip. Every piece in this issue follows a road that was already old when the railway posters told people to take it, through country that learned to receive travelers before the word tourism existed, and the stops along the way were not chosen for novelty but for the simple fact that people have been pulling over for them for generations, which is the only credential that holds.

Come to these routes with time to spare and no strong opinion about arrival. The rhythm of a road driven the right way requires a certain willingness to let the miles be miles, and the towns that appear in these pages have all, in one way or another, been waiting for exactly the traveler who is not in a hurry. Read the pieces through before you go, note which stops are worth planning around, and book the nights far earlier than feels reasonable. The roads will take care of the rest.