The Long Way Home

I’ve been driving the same 110 miles back and forth from the Triangle to Seaboard since I was a college sophomore in 1979. In the beginning I drove a tiny silver Chevrolet Monza, courtesy of my dad, later totaled by my then-teenaged nephew. Now I roll down 85 in a giant Ford Flex filled to the roof with Mom’s wheelchair and walker. The vehicles and passengers may change, but the drive stays comfortably the same.

So let’s do the math. That’s 35 years. Let’s say I made the drive 1.5 times a month for 12 months. So that’s 630 trips x 2 for the return trip x 100 miles per trip and that’s a whopping 126,000 miles. Or if you prefer – 2 hours a trip or 2520 hours in a car on the same road.

Some folks prefer to shoot down 95 – it’s a few more miles as the crow flies but faster, faster, faster. I don’t like all the jockeying for position and passing and rude north/south drivers tearing up that piece of asphalt. Instead, I stick to the drive that my Dad plotted out for me on a wrinkled NC map with a ruler way back in the day. My route takes me on 85 until Norlina where I hop on 158 paralleling the VA border until I take a quick hop onto 301 past Weldon to 186 in Garysburg which lands me smack dab in the one flashing light intersection of Seaboard.

It’s the long way home.

But I know every good bathroom stop. Every antique shop. Every Bojangles for sweet tea. I’ve watched buildings go up and houses fall down. I've seen crops planted, grow and be harvested: tobacco, cotton, corn, peanuts, soybeans.  I love the snow-like tufts of picked cotton that appear on the side of the road for miles around the Seaboard cotton gin. I've seen the rise and fall of a shabby juke joint named the Foxy Lady. I look for the Taylors’ sunflowers in Gumberry to stretch and reach for the sun in summer and wait for the Christmas lights in Littleton to go up one more time on the aging streetlights in winter. And I love it all.

There’s a stoplight I ran once near Weldon because I was crying with worry over my Dad’s health. I got pulled and the kind policemen took in the overwrought mom, two small boys, and a giant pink stuffed lion all buckled into a messy minivan and said only “Be more careful, you've got precious cargo in there.”

My Dad survived that crisis and when the years passed and he could no longer make the drive to visit me, I took to picking up my parents and bringing them to Durham myself. Every time we passed Lake Country Veterinary Hospital outside of Roanoke Rapids, my mom would say: “That’s where Elaine takes her dogs” forgetting that she had told us before, and before and before. So now as Mom and I cruise that same road it’s a game for us – who can see it first – who can utter that same phrase: “That’s where Elaine takes her dogs.”  Who can win.

And then there’s the athletic field halfway between Norlina and Macon where Mom and I pulled over around midnight on a Friday two years ago. Zack had been admitted into the UNC Hospital with a bruised spleen from a wretched case of mono. Mom and I had started the long drive home to be met only with a nightmare storm that pounded down so hard that we couldn't see the yellow line or even hear each other speak. We stopped and waited until the monsoon quieted and then pulled back onto the road that even in darkness was as familiar as the back of my hand.

Saturday Mom and I headed that road again on the way to a family Christmas party at Ralph’s BBQ in Weldon. The trip started out with snowflakes which changed to sleet and then rain. It was a gray, ugly day. And we looked anew at one of our landmarks: a brown aging double-wide trailer near Beef Tongue Road in Macon. The lot of this home was once filled with soaring pine trees, but then suddenly one trip they were gone, leaving a yard riddled with stumps. This worries my Mom and she usually comments on it saying “If I lived there, I would have to work on getting those stumps up. Just one at a time. I couldn't just leave them there.”

So we look, every trip, to see if there is any progress. And this trip? No progress at all. But something unexpected caught my eye. There was a fresh white strand of Christmas lights tacked to the roofline of that tattered doublewide. And they were twinkling to beat the band, a glowing reminder of the approach of Christmas, the majesty of the birth of the Messiah, hope for all, regardless of dwelling.

It gave me a warm feeling to see those lights. One I carried all the way to Seaboard and back again to Durham. And that, my friends, is why I’ll continue to take the long way home.