Column: Roots and Routes

A white shield against a black background on a two-foot square. In the center, in a sans-serif font, two numerals: one curved, the other straight and thin. This must be among my early visual memories, though I know I’ve constructed it from hundreds of instances. It’s a U.S. Highway 31 route sign.

Some of my friends have roots. Wherever they go, however far, some part of their souls stays in the soil from which they sprang. They have someplace always to return to.

I have someplace always to go on to. I have routes.

I started to sense this the summer I turned 21. I’d arrived in a small Alabama city to intern at a church there. I’d never been to Hartselle, Ala., before, but a sign on the main north-south street startled me with familiarity. Four hundred miles north, in the small Indiana city of my childhood, the main north-south street was marked with ones just like it. And I remembered seeing them in Nashville, Tenn., a city I loved that I thought I might move to for grad school. I wondered, does this road thread through my life, stitching it together?

I thought that, as Highway 61 was Bob Dylan’s, Highway 31 might be my personal mother road. It runs from the Straits of Mackinac between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to the Battleship Parkway Causeway across Mobile Bay. So many dots along it invite connection. Like Mackinaw City, Mich., where I loved the high-latitudes light. Indianapolis, visited so many times it seemed like a home. Columbus, Ohio, where I was born and learned to ride a bike. Louisville, Ky., where her namesake Belle is berthed. Nashville and its skyline. So many others my wheels touched as I rolled down roads.

For a route isn’t a road. It’s a pattern imposed, a way to connect dots, then see a line. That’s one thing I know as a person who has routes. Every place is singular, gloriously and sometimes hilariously unique. And in every place, many paths meet.

Also, all roads lead to India. I learned this from Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy, who realized it while riding the bicycle given her for her tenth birthday. If she kept pedaling long enough, she thought, she would get to India. (Years later, she did.)

So, whether we’re rooted or routed, to recall the wisdom of cult classic “Buckaroo Banzai:” wherever we go, there we are. And every destination is at least conceivably within reach. Including that special destination we call home.

I’m far from Highway 31 these days; Google Maps tells me it would take a 339-mile bike ride to Indy to reach it. But I’m revisiting Highway 61 where I’m sojourning, and it’s a good route, too. One more thing I know is that home isn’t where you’re from. Still less is it where you sleep. Home is where you’re you.