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Excerpts

The Road Less Traveled

If ever you grow weary of the modern world, take a turn toward Vermont, where the pavement ends. Vermonters are devoted to their thousands of miles of unpaved roads -- and Vermonter Howard Jillson Coffin can tell you why.

COFFIN First they love the rutted path, I think, because it's the way things used to be, and not the way things are becoming.

In Vermont, they call it "preventing the future." An unpaved road keeps you from driving too fast, or forgetting too fast.

COFFIN Some of the most wonderful people that ever inhabited the earth lived in these hills and hollows. We don't have enough of those people today. We remember those things when we're on a back road.

Robert Frost, the poet of New England, wrote about the charms of the road less traveled. Surely, that was an unpaved road -- maybe this one.

We are in a great rush now, of course. But we used to meander, just as the dirt roads of Vermont still do.

On the unbending interstate, you can see the future ahead of you, many, many miles ahead. On a dirt road, however, you can see something better than that. You can see the past.

Copyright © 1998 by Estate of Charles Kuralt