No time for these old roads

Working from home, I drive a lot less these days. It's often two weeks between visits to the gas station. My trips have a purpose, to run errands or go to an appointment or to get from one place to another by a specific time. I drive familiar roads and glance down the side roads. I still know where the side roads go, but it's been years, decades, since I traveled them.

Cars way back when had odometers with removable cables. In some cases, you could hook up a power drill and take miles off of the car in a matter of minutes. My father routinely disconnected the cable on his car, "to keep it young." He'd reconnect it so that the mileage look low, but reasonable.

As a teenager, then, I could drive a couple hundred miles in a day and refill the tank for three bucks. I drove back roads around the small towns of north central Massachusetts, the barely paved roads that wrapped around Mount Wachusett, the twisted tunnels with tree branches shielding the sky. Miles from town, a trailer might have been plunked into a small plot of more-or-less level land. Many houses had more cars than people on the chance that enough cars would start on any given morning.

And so, the other day, coming back from a meeting in Amherst, I took a road I'd not traveled, Monson Turnpike northward toward Athol. Monson Turnpike would have reached Monson except for the intervention of the Quabbin Reservoir in the 1930s. (This 1895 map gives you an idea of the roads before the Quabbin was filled.) The road merged into another road in Athol, nice and nicer houses along the way. The Athol-Royalston Middle School is on the south side of Athol, as far from Royalston as you can get, an eight-to-ten mile ride for school kids.

It wasn't much of a diversion, just a few miles out of my way, but enough to remember that there are old roads that were important once. There are more than enough ways to get anyplace quickly, if that's what you want.