A long dirt road
2023:11:04

Before I left my home, I was asked by a mentor of mine in Vershire, Vermont, to reflect on a question: What, Clark, are you leaving behind?

I considered the question. By the time I’d reach my destination in Okayama, Japan, I would be nearly 7,000 miles from home. With 2 bags, one complete with tools, I wouldn’t be bringing much in terms of momentos. Moreover I am uncertain as to how long I will remain in Japan; the timeline is not set. “Home” may change...what then makes East Warren, Vermont, my home now? What does it mean to leave it, and more to the point here: remember it? 

This is the image which came to mind.

A long dirt road

Hard-packed. A blue-gravel gray, smooth underfoot in the early fall and soft as potter’s clay in the early spring. One I’ve walked, ran, driven, rutted by tractor and fixed by hand, doused and re-doused in the summer’s breezy heat, seen from the heights of mountains nearby through brambles, beech and young birch; a north-south line in a hilly, un-encompassed valley.

I travel this road frequently.

Two branches of the same brook pass by culverts one mile apart; great pools lie at their junctures with the road. In the warmer months, I bathe in these stone-lined basins; in the winter, I seek the water in the morning: to see the sunlight speckle, to feel a ray’s warmth on my skin, to hear the river ice dislocate, dislodge, in the growing presence of the day...

Trails spur from this road.

A series of skids lead to a secluded meadow south of the bigger pool. Two apple trees, ancient, sprawling, still fruiting, stand on the crest of this meadow and form the ground of a precipice overlooking the river valley below. Strangely, I have never once seen another person here. People walk the dirt road daily. I see them. I know their names and I know where along the road they live. I even know which side of the road they prefer to walk along, how far they will go, how long they will take to make that distance with the day’s light fading... 

But, among my many hours in these mountains, I have never once come across another person. On a faint deer track on the ridge, it has been my footsteps I’ve rediscovered, re-encountered, after several years without returning. It has been my hands which have cut and moved downed trees, clearing the main spurs and bridges over the creeks. It has been my furrows in the snow which I’ve skied time and time again, climbing and dropping back down into the lower skids which ultimately lead to the road.

Where are the people?

For me this road is a point of departure and a point of return. The adventure starts upon departing from the gravel, and ends once my feet meet that surface again. A kind of territory results; a whole and secret world. At the center of this map lies the road, bold, thick, black, clearly marked by houses and fields and brook crossings, and east and west are undefined: paths foray wildly, sharply, searchingly into the grey, certain points exclaimed in color and others dimly forgotten (a paranthetical note) and whole areas completely blank. Perhaps the folks on the road have maps like these...or elsewhere, territories of their own. Mine is a large tract of hardwood forest located in East Warren Vermont on the western face of the Northfield Mountains. 

It’s what I’m leaving behind. 
It’s where I’ve returned time and time again.
It’s an origin.


Clark O’Bryan



Senor road, East Warren, Vermont
1962 - Black and white
Courtesy of  Vermont Agency of Transportation’s Highway Mapping Unit