Country Road Therapy.

Image: country roads and shady lanes.

Peter Bronson.

Image: country road in Northumberland,

Country-road therapy soothes the soul
BY PETER BRONSON | ENQUIRER STAFF WRITER
A shaggy forest of tasseled corn makes a green wall on the left side of the two-lane road, blotting out everything but the blue July sky and a flock of white clouds. On the right side of the road, another field stretches smooth, green and perfectly rectangular like a pool table of soybeans.

A hand-painted sign says, "Cucs, Homegrown Sweet Corn, Tomatoes, Fresh Flowers." It points to a little white-painted shack beside the road, where a half-dozen ears of corn, a bag of tomatoes and a cantaloupe that looks like a tan bowling ball goes for about the cost of a Starbucks latte downtown.

The sky is bluer, the clouds are whiter and the shades of green could fill two boxes of crayons. The air is clean and fresh like a sheet on a clothesline. It feels like I'm a time zone away from Cincinnati. But all this ordinary beauty is just 25 miles from the city.

I sometimes wonder if cities are just manmade islands of delusional self-importance, surrounded by a lush green sea of real life.

THE FLAVORS OF SUMMER

Out here along U.S. 27, on the way back from Miami University in Oxford, July is not a desk calendar of dates, appointments and meetings. It has a flavor: "Homegrown Sweet Corn." It has a color: "Tomatoes, Fresh Flowers."

It has a smell like baled hay and fresh-cut grass. I get the feeling that if I could get out at one of the farmhouses and wander into the cool darkness of a big white barn, I would smell again the exotic farm smell of oil leaking from an old John Deere tractor, dusty hay in the loft and corn-silage fermenting in an old silo that is rounded on top like a worn eraser.

I've heard of physical therapy, occupational therapy, water therapy and music therapy. I prefer country-road therapy.

The prescription is simple: Take a full tank of gas and a summer afternoon, and just drive until the billboards are replaced by barns and the skyscrapers turn into silos.

DRIVING TO JUST ... DRIVE

I suppose the notion of driving aimlessly makes the energy-conservation police squirm like a tomato worm on a hot shovel. But once upon a time, driving with no place to go was our American birthright. It was a way to cool down, relax and see the country.

When I had a motorcycle, I spent hours exploring country roads, cruising down shady gravel lanes, past farms and tiny towns. I discovered drive-ins and taverns, sleepy hardware stores and long, winding stretches of two-lane blacktop, framed by green crops, blue skies and red barns.

Mostly, I found another world, a place where garish neon signs and strip malls were as rare as freeways, street crime and traffic jams. It's still there, just a few miles out of the city - a place where God's bounty overflows the landscape.

THE OTHER AMERICA

I caught a glimpse of this other America this summer when I drove out West, through the rolling farmlands in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. By comparison, cities are much smaller than they look through the magnifying egos of people who think they run the world from the top of tall buildings.

By comparison, the other America is vast, peaceful and happy. It knows who it is. It knows the value of family, friendship and hard work.

As I got back to Interstate 275, the corn and soybeans gave way to a strange and ragged crop of tall signs shouting about hamburgers and stores that sell tomatoes as hard as Jonathan apples.

But my car was filled with the earthy garden smell of fresh-picked tomatoes and melons, to remind me of the value of country roads, Homegrown Sweet Corn and a July day that is too soon gone.