A few years ago I was speaking with another college parent, who would later become our son’s father-in-law. We spoke about the usual things parents talk about as we moved boxes into dorm rooms for another year of college. We talked about the transition into independence for our children, about our worries and concerns, about the high cost of education and a dozen other topics in a broken conversation style as we went back and forth to our cars and took short breaks from hauling boxes up the stairs. He was telling me that his daughter waited to obtain her drivers license and that she had little experience with driving. She was going to be taking classes in downtown Portland, Oregon and commuting by car from Forest Grove. He said he was comfortable with her driving on the freeways and in the city traffic. He thought, however, that she wasn’t ready for the open road and rural areas. He didn’t want her to drive alone from Oregon to their California home because there were “too many miles of empty road.”
I thought at the time that he and I had a different perspective. I had driven from Oregon to California and I didn’t find any “empty road” by my standards. Interstate 5 is a freeway filled with cars all the way. And even US 101 often has enough traffic to keep things moving slower than you’d drive without all the other cars.
A few weeks later, I was visiting with a friend from North Dakota as his father was in the hospital in Rapid City recovering from surgery. Suddenly he looked at his watch and announced that he had to go. I casually asked him where he was going and he reported that he had to go to Sturgis to meet his sons. His two sons, ages 14 and 16 both had drivers licenses and they were driving from their home to Rapid City. He had made them wait in Sturgis for him. They were, in his opinion, safe to drive the 135 miles of South Dakota Highway 79 down to Sturgis. However, he didn’t want them getting on that busy Interstate highway and driving in Rapid City traffic.
I thought at the time that it sure would be fun to arrange a conversation between these two fathers. One saw rural and isolated areas as dangerous. The other saw cities and traffic as dangerous.
When our kids took drivers’ education, both reported that the instructor commented that they were very good at driving on gravel roads. Though the bulk of the course took place in Rapid City and on area roads, there was one day when they headed to the country and drove on gravel roads. I had been driving with our kids, but we had restricted our travels to rural roads where there was little traffic as they learned to drive. I thought that was the way all kids learned to drive. When we learned, our father started us out in a large open field with nothing to run into.
We think about space in different ways.
I enjoy living in Rapid City very much. I am comfortable driving its streets and know my way around town. I use the Interstate highway to get from one end of town to the other and to travel across the state as well. I have lived and driven in cities enough to be comfortable in city traffic. On our recent trip to the west coast we drove in heavy traffic in Tacoma Washington and in Portland Oregon. I’ve learned to read the signs and choose the correct lane. I’ve learned appropriate spacing and how to look for brake lights several cars ahead of me. I’ve learned to stay in my lane and to look for other cars before changing lanes.
But there was nothing in the urban driving that I did that feels as refreshing as driving in the open country. Yesterday we drove north on SD highway 79 on the route taken by my friend’s sons. Heading north from Newell it takes an hour to get to Reva, which is not a big enough town to warrant a decrease in the speed limit. From there, we headed east on SD 20 past Prairie City, which if you’ve been there you’d know that they have a different definition of “city” than other places - say Los Angeles or Chicago. From there we caught the road up through Lodgepole to Hettinger. It was fun to watch our GPS which showed a highway running across an empty screen. It didn’t seem to know that the south and north forks of the Grand even exist. It didn’t show the town of Lodgepole, which is big enough for its own Zip Code. It is 57640. Don’t ask me why I remember that detail.
The ground is saturated with all of the precipitation that has fallen in the past few weeks and there are places where the fences have sagged. There were a number of cows who found themselves on the wrong side of the fence. They did, however, present a bit more challenge to driving than other cars. The road wasn’t exactly crowded.
I love driving in the open country. I can let my mind wander a bit more than I would be able to do were I driving in the city. I can appreciate the scenery. I can see the view. In the open country you can see a prominent feature like the slim buttes for dozens of miles.
The drive has a restorative effect on me. I relaxed after a hectic morning when not everything went according to plan.
What I did not feel was any sense of fear. Unlike those who have lived in cities all of their lives, I know that the country that seems empty isn’t really so. If we were to break down we would only have to wait a few minutes for another car to come by. And that car would stop and help. There is nothing at all dangerous about driving through the empty country.
The Bible reports that Jesus would get up in the early hours and go off to a lonely place to pray. I find the places other people call lonely to be wonderful places to listen to God. I am indeed fortunate to be able to go to the lonely places often.
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