I realized today that, except for college, which was in the middle of farm country, and perhaps that vague, un-remembered time of my childhood before we moved to Michigan, I have always lived by busy roads.
From 1983 until 1998, I lived on the corner of a cul-de-sac and a busy two-lane road that my father claims was not that busy when we moved in. It wasn’t until construction on another road rerouted the big trucks past our dining room window that it got really loud. Though, in my childhood memories, road noise does not play a part. There was a row of forsythia to block part of it and my father also planted a crooked row of spruce trees that were getting pretty substantial by the time my parents moved into a condo (where you can hear the noise from nearby I-75).
After college, I lived briefly with a roommate and then my husband in an apartment building along Fulton Avenue in the Heritage Hill area of Grand Rapids. That was a busy road—I could take it all the way to my new job in the publishing biz two towns over—though we didn’t hear it much since our first floor apartment was on the other side of the building and half buried in the ground. We could hear a pretty nasty raccoon war going on right outside the window one summer.
Then we moved to a sixth-floor apartment right off 28th Street in Grand Rapids. Despite how busy 28th Street is, it wasn’t bad as far as noise goes—until the hobby shop in the nearby strip mall started running model car races every weekend. The high-pitched whine of those infernal tiny cars competed with the boisterous announcer coming over a loudspeaker in what felt like a concerted effort to throw me into a murderous rage. We eventually moved to a fourth-floor apartment on the other side of the same building to save our sanity.
When we moved to Lansing, our realtor led us through a charming neighborhood to see a beautiful brick house we fell in love with and lived in for 18 years. It wasn’t long before I realized that the route she took to get us to the house was very purposeful; it kept us from noticing how close it was to a busy interchange between a four-lane state highway and the expressway. We saw the house on a weekend when traffic was light and noise from horns and sirens (which became increasingly regular during our years there) was minimal.
Most recently, we’ve moved to a cul-de-sac, which, after all, is my natural habitat. But our backyard abuts a narrow line of trees and underbrush which, in turn, abuts a freeway. During our first winter, especially, it has been maddeningly loud. I have tree-planting plans to mitigate some of that, but it will be years before those trees are big enough to make a noticeable difference.
Living near these roads I have witnessed two dogs get hit by cars. I have heard uncountable tires screeching. I once saw a car-motorcycle accident that is burned into my memory. And at one point when our backyard was unfenced for a while in Lansing, a sketchy looking guy ambled up my driveway and into my backyard, paused to throw up (thankfully just beyond our property) and then kept walking. He did it so nonchalantly I got the feeling that he’d taken that route a lot since the old rotted picket fence came down.
Whether they are busy (or frequented by drunk vagrants) or not, roads have great potential as story starters. Roads connect places and people who, sometimes, might be better off if they’d kept to themselves. Let’s explore some possible storylines that start with someone on, under, or coming up from a road.
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