A Road that Defied Man and Machine

By Robert Cowser

   When I was a child, my family lived on the Old Saltillo-Greenwood Road.  I have pleasant memories of walking up and down this peaceful road. On early summer mornings the sand in the roadway in front of our house felt cool and moist to my bare feet, especially after a heavy dew.  Unfortunately, however, not all the memories associated with the road are pleasant.  Often in the winter and early spring it was impossible to drive a vehicle down the road because of the deep mud. For an adolescent whose only other contact with the outside world was the battery-powered radio, this situation was frustrating.

   Just to the north of our house was a red clay hill

that proved the nemesis for more than a few Fords

and Chevies.  Half an inch of rain made it impossible

for even the experienced driver to avoid plunging

his/her car into one of the deep ditches on either side

of the road.

   Though it was not a heavy car, the Model A Ford

usually managed better than the later models, for its

narrower wheels could make new ruts more easily

than the Fords made in the mid-'30s. The elevated

chassis of the Model A could avoid getting stuck on

the high centers.of the roadbed.

   Usually the school bus from Saltillo turned around

at our house and began its trip back north. However,

there were times in the winter when the driver could

not drive the bus up the clay hill. On those days the four or five others who rode the bus from our stop and I would get up earlier than usual and walk a mile up to the Caldwells' house. There we would get the bus.

   One morning when the clay hill was impassable, the bus driver failed to wait for four of us. Nadine Webb, Marjorie Young, my brother R. L. and I.  We walked the extra four miles from Caldwells' house, stopping at the drugstore in Saltillo.  The time was ten or eleven o'clock.  We knew that we had missed our first two classes.  Instead of going to school, we spent our lunch money for Greyhound bus tickets to Mt.Vernon, five miles away.  Nadines's excuse was that she wanted to investigate the possibility of transferring to Mt. Vernon High School.  Since she lived in Franklin County, of which Mt. Vernon is the county seat, she was eligible. The others and I had no excuse except that we were angry that the driver had not waited on us.

   Since we ate no lunch that day, my brother and I ate voraciously at supper.  There was no beef hash left over that night.  Our parents were not happy about our missing school, but they did not punish us.  Maybe they though that experiencing the discomfort of going without food after walking miles to town and then walking around the square in Mt. Vernon was enough to remind us not to do such a foolish thing again.

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Robert Cowser is a retired professor emeritus of English at the University of Tennessee at Martin. He now lives in Martin, Tennessee

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