Somewhere on a dirt road - #109

The old-timer in me is waving to the old-timer in you.

Every March, some of the best cyclists in the world descend upon Tuscany to race the Strade Bianche, 184 kilometers of road and gravel. The race has been part of the UCI World Tour since 2007, but was first established as a public gran fondo in 1997 — so long as you had a vintage bike to ride it. That was the point: to honor and protect the history of Italy, of Siena, and of the strade bianche themselves: the white gravel roads. 

In Italy, the strade bianche are protected like a historic building. They connect Siena to its past and its heritage. They meander through olive groves and open meadows, kicking up a fine dust of limestone behind them. In the race, the dust appears like a phantom around the wheels of the peloton, like a cloud carrying them along to their finish. 

Your most avid cyclists will debate whether the Strade Bianche race deserves the pedestal it sits on within the World Tour, but none would deny its delight. Dirt roads will do that to a person. Dirt roads have always done that to me.

I grew up on a paved two-lane highway in an off-market grocery store town of 2,500 people. The speed limit was 45mph though you wouldn’t know it. The police never waited more than a half mile in, and once out of sight, lead foots sank easily to 60 past mailboxes and fences. There was a road that wrapped around well behind my house, connecting on both ends to the highway. My parents always shook their heads, “no you can’t ride your bike to it.” I stayed in the yard, my bike mostly in the garage. 

As an adult, I found my way back to bikes and eventually back to dirt. Years of riding road meant I’d been hit by cars three times: side-swiped by a coal-roller at an intersection, T-boned at dusk riding home from work lit up like a Christmas tree, and finally slammed head first into the curb as a van took a left turn into me while I was riding straight through a green light. I got back on my bike, rode the rest of the way to the office, and patched myself up with the first aid kit. It wasn’t until later that morning that I stopped making sense and my friends took me to the ER. 

I started riding dirt after that. In LA County, there’s a spider web of fire roads that weave along the ridge lines and through the chaparral and forests. They’re built for fire protection, dirt moats between the tinder fields of the Santa Monica Mountains and the Angeles Crest Forest. But when they’re not being bulldozed to three times their width to stop an onslaught of coming flames, they’re used for recreation. Mountain bikers, gravel riders, hikers, runners, walkers, birders, and fools in flip flops can be found scattered across them as the ground transitions from loose sand to clay to rocks. 

The fire roads were a safe haven of shared entertainment, and for the most part, people followed dirt etiquette: wave, say hi, let someone know you’re coming, uphill has right of way, always move off trail for horses, and in general, play nice. The same could not be said of the road. Roads, if we can barely collectively remember, were built for everyone before the car became our armor of choice. On Topanga Canyon Boulevard, there was an iron grip on this past by some locals as cyclists, horses, and the bravest of amblers hugged the side of the road as 30,000 commuters used the canyon as a bypass from the freeways, texting and honking and crossing the double yellow at their seeming leisure. It felt like once a week someone flipped their car on a road where the speed limit never exceeded 40mph. More than once I had a motorist call me a slut from their rolled down window as I rode my bike and they easily passed me, not a moment of their precious day lost. 

In LA and everywhere, the worst thing to be in modern times is inconvenienced, if for a moment, or even if for a moment imagined. Cars granted people permission to be anonymous and in turn, cruel. Traffic is without question one of the reasons we left LA, but it’s not because it took a long time to get places — it’s because people were assholes while they were driving. After eight years, we couldn’t take how blatantly selfish and vicious people were simply because they were in their own soundtracked tanks, only paying enough attention to periodically get mad at the people around them. For every person who let you merge, nine more wouldn’t care if you died on the road as long as it was behind them. 

The first time we drove into this town, the road was made entirely of compacted snow. Two large dogs ran out in front of us from one of the properties, enjoying the brief midday sun flooding into the narrow canyon. We slowed a bit until they circled around to the back of the car, gleefully chasing after us. In the winter, the road signs are unfolded from their summer positions to warn of avalanches, cautioning drivers to not stop for any reason. For an eerie omen, the rest of the signals are more cheerful, both from the signs and from the residents. In the winter months, the snow road is listed as closed on Google Maps. It isn’t, but it might be. The only other drivers you see either live here or live near, and most importantly, almost all of them wave.

Some people wave their whole hand. In that case, it’s less of a wave and more of a hand raising. A backcountry acknowledgment that if you’re back here you must be of here, if not by address then at least of spirit.

Then there’s the two-finger. The two-finger stems from driving a manual. Right hand resting for the clutch, left hand on the wheel, two-fingers up to maintain control but say hello. 

Finally, there’s the one-finger. The lift of the singular index finger. This means I have lived here forever, and if you ruin this place, I’ll find you. Also, hello. 

Any one of these acknowledgments is a delight. Our county issues windshield stickers every year with your new tags, and locals stack them up along the edge of the glass like merit badges. We don’t look for the stickers to wave, but when someone doesn’t wave, we do look to see if they had the stickers at all. 

On this road, the dogs and cats rule. On this road, the lemonade stand has their own stop sign. And on this road, people slow down and make room for runners and cyclists. But that’s the way of the dirt road. You know the rules as soon as you turn onto it, as soon as your car heaves itself from asphalt to dirt like jumping into choppy water. The persistent rumble changes the tone of the story, it is the shift from convenience to country that beckons you to look into the wooded walls more closely, to watch for who might be making to cross. 

It is dirt, after all. It’s one more piece of earth that still gets to breathe with the seasons, changing shape and form as the air freezes and warms above her. She hasn’t yet been sealed beneath the concreting of humanity, smothered by year after year of asphalt asphyxiating her. Instead, she can still call for your attention. She can still beckon and challenge you to avoid rocks and potholes, to follow tire lines and speed limits. In the summer she roars a fury behind if you drive too fast, blinding whoever is behind you in her dust. It’s her way of asking you to slow down, be gentle with her and be better with those around you. 

Last year, in a late season snowfall, we were heading to the airport on an unplowed road. There were 12 fresh inches, and we were behind one of our more nervous neighbors. They drove a perfectly capable truck, but they were clearly frightened by driving in the unplowed snow. They drove no more than 15 mph all the way to the highway, and we drove behind them. And we drove behind them the whole way. Because that’s the point. The point is not “I have to get to the airport! Hurry up!” The point is that passing that neighbor would’ve scared them more and we’d allotted plenty of time to drive on snowy dirt roads. This is a dirt road. Not a highway. 

Most of America is accessible by some kind of road, and of course people want them paved They’re easier to plow, easier to drive, easier to check your phone on, easier to speed on, easier to pass people on, easier to maintain, easier to get package after package after package after package. They are, by all accounts, easier. But easy doesn’t always make for good people. And if you’re looking for easy, it’s getting easier and easier to find it.

From the now defunct All Streets project.

The cyclists who sought out to protect the white gravel roads of Italy had something we fall short on in our cities and towns: history. This country is much better at wiping it out than preserving it. But the dirt here is the same dirt the Ute made hunting trails on. The same dirt the horses and mules came in on. It’s the same dirt that waited outside the steps of the saloons and hotels, schools and churches all lost to snow and fire and catastrophe. It’s the same dirt we’ve been traveling for centuries. It’s the same dirt it’s always been for as long as we’ve been and hopefully will be. 

When my anxiety was at its worst, it was at its most maniacal on airplanes. It would whisper promises about heart attacks and suicidal pilots, storms and mechanical failures, and turbulence would always, always make it worse. There was one thing that would make it better though. In the throes of panic and on the verge of tears, I would whisper right back, “you’re on a dirt road in the sky.”

It cradled me, that image. It swept me away to a place I could breathe, where I knew we were always going some better than we’d started: to a mountain of pine trees or a lake where the fish jumped out to dance in the sun, to a campground with Spam and marshmallows, to somewhere where everything else was not. When I’m driving on a dirt road, it doesn’t really matter where I’m going. I’m already exactly where I want to be. 

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Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you’re our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the
same basic materials—
cousins of that first exploding from nothing—
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us,
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.

—Sharon Olds