Highway 34: Turn left if you're going right

When I was growing up, my family said Highway 34 was engineered by a black snake.

If you look at the serpentine curves that go over and around the Ozark hills between here and Van Buren, Mo., you'll see why.

And it hasn't changed much since then.

I can remember when the new bridge across the St. Francois River went in near Sam A. Baker State Park. Highway 34 was realigned too, which meant a straight stretch of road.

While Highway 34 has its flaws, many folks I knew over yonder considered it a major upgrade, compared to the rough roads that came before it. And it was, after all, the road to somewhere. The road by which good things came to isolated farms in the hills. The road that started a journey of a thousand miles.

As someone who was (and still is) prone to carsickness, going very far from our Killough Valley farm often proved to be quite a challenge.

But Highway 34 is much like many other two-lane highways that go through the hills of southern Missouri. The roads tend to follow the ridges, with gravel roads branching off into the valleys below.

Years ago, those side roads were really rough. Some of them were county roads, and some weren't. The county roads were graded from time to time, but most of them were too substandard for the U.S. Postal Service or school buses. As a result, walking a mile up the hill to the highway was a fairly regular occurrence to get the mail and catch the school bus.

Nowadays, the road to Killough Valley is still gravel but well-maintained by comparison. Several of the worst kinks and ruts have been eliminated.

When I was young, one piece of the road down in the valley went through muddy ruts for several hundred feet. It took a mighty dry summer for those long mudholes to go away. Passenger cars frequently mired in the mud, and we would take our tractor to pull out the cars.

In addition to being winding and narrow, Highway 34 in the 1950s still went through open-range land. In addition to deer bolting out of the woods into the highway, we also had cattle and hogs to contend with.

Open range meant the owners of the livestock could let the animals wander wherever they wanted, particularly during droughts when fields didn't produce enough grass or hay. You would come around a blind bend in the road, and there would be some cows on the highway.

Because Highway 34 and other highways like it are so crooked, they don't exactly go east and west, north and south. They start off one way and wind up another.

From our house in the Killough Valley, the town where we did our shopping was due north across Black River. But to go to town, we took the gravel road in front of the house south to the highway, which eventually crossed one of the few available bridges and made its way up a long valley before crossing the hill that overlooked the town. Total driving distance: nine miles. As the crow flies: four miles.

Long stretches of Highway 34 have no shoulders. If you have a flat or your car conks out, you either have to find a side road to pull off or stop right in a lane of traffic.

I can remember waiting for the postman for more than an hour without another car passing by. But when big trucks came -- say a truck loaded with hickory logs headed for the handle factory or oak logs going to the barrel factory or pine logs on their way to a sawmill -- it wasn't going to be able to stop for a car in the highway.

The 80-some miles of Highway 34 from Cape Girardeau to U.S. 60 in Carter County go through some of the prettiest scenery in all of Missouri. It sure would be nice to be able to take a peek once in a while instead of watching all those curves.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the Southeast Missourian. E-mail: jsullivan@semissourian.com.