BOB KORNEGAY: Loving the long way home

“I‘ll get home in less than five hours,” said a friend as he prepared to depart from fishing camp. “How long will it take you?”

“I’m going back on the Interstate,” offered another. “I’ll pull into my driveway a little after noon.”

“Me, too,” a third said. “One quick stop for gas is all I’ll have to make. How about you, Bob?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I answered, “but my trip will likely take a mite longer than any of yours.”

He shouldn’t have even asked. Heck, they all knew my travel habits. I’d take the long route.

Now, I certainly understand trip duration and the shortest distance between two points are often valid considerations. Sometimes it’s necessary to shave time. If we’re not careful, however, that can become an obsession.

On this occasion, for instance, none of our party for whom the shortest drive back home seemed so vitally important had anything pressing awaiting him there. Nothing, at least, that a couple of extra hours on the road might affect. Yet, for some reason, they all exhibited a burning compulsion to load up, gas up, crank up and motor homeward as fast as humanly possible.

Not me, thank you. I’ll take the backroads, the “blue highways,” the thoroughfares and trails winding through, not around, the forests and farmlands and small towns. Give me roads with stops and pull-overs and detours where I might want to see a sight, take a picture, or just plain go for going’s sake. Can’t give you a logical reason I’m like that. It’s just the way I’m wired.

I’ve been taking the long way home most of my life. As a child, if the fish weren’t biting in the creek, I often walked a mile or two out of my way to hunt arrowheads in some fallow field before returning to “civilization.” My boyhood buddies and I were notorious for leaving the beaten paths homeward to gather plums at abandoned homesites or stuff ourselves with fat blackberries that grew otherwise undisturbed in some out-of-the-way locale.

Sometimes we’d detour for no other reason than to gawk at huge hornets’ nests or amble through patches of bright wildflowers. Some of the flowers, by the way, we’d pick to take back with us. Pretty, “thoughtful” mama-gifts always tempered the “why-are-you-so-late” scoldings we were bound to receive.

Once, as a high school senior, I made a long-way-home trek to a cypress pond just to lay eyes on a free-roaming alligator. Gators were scarce in 1970. Seeing one was a “wonderment.” I saw two that evening. What if I’d missed that?

Likewise, a couple of weeks ago, if I’d been in too big a hurry to get back to my truck after an afternoon birding hike, I might have missed seeing that elusive grasshopper sparrow in the brush a few yards off the trail. Yep, just a couple of weeks ago. I’ve never outgrown it.

A while back, Interstate 81 might have shaved a lot of time off a homeward-bound trip southward through western Virginia. It would also have routed me past Troutville, on old U.S. 11, where I met a toothless old man who grew his own chewing tobacco and told wonderful lies about big smallmouth bass.

Years before, I-75 would have taken me around Reliance, Tennessee and the Cherokee National Forest, not to mention some mighty good trout fishing and a lady who sold me a hunk of real hoop cheese and a thick slice of bologna she cut off the log herself. Both encounters wound up costing me an extra day’s travel. Such a small price to pay.

The long way home continues to beckon today. As in, “Let me see what’s just around that next bend in the river before I head in” or “I’ll take this trail here. It’ll carry me around to that big pool just below the waterfall” or “Hey, let’s turn off on that little road about a mile up ahead.” Why? Why not? It’s going in the same direction we are.

Yep, the express routes and the fast lanes have their places, and sometimes even I can’t avoid them. But the long way back? Well, I’ll take it whenever I can. Even my GPS can’t talk me out of it.

Come join me sometime. I’ll help you pick some wildflowers, just in case.

Contact outdoors columnist Bob Kornegay at [email protected].