Рэй Брэдбери: The Other Highway

They drove into green Sunday-morning country, away from the hot aluminum city, and watched as the sky was set free and moved over them like a lake they had never known was there, amazingly blue and with white breakers above them as they traveled.

Clarence Travers slowed the car and felt the cool wind move over his face with the smell of cut grass. He reached over to grasp his wife's hand and glanced at his son and daughter in the backseat, not fighting, at least for this moment, as the car moved through one quiet beauty after another in what might be a Sunday so lush and green it would never end.

«Thank God we're doing this,» said Cecelia Travers. «It's been a million years since we got away.» He felt her hand hug his and then relax completely. «when I think of all those ladies dropping dead from the heat at the cocktail parry this afternoon, welt»

«Well, indeed,» said Clarence Travers. «Onward!»

He pressed the gas pedal and they moved faster. Their progress out of the city had been mildly hysterical, with cars shrieking and shoving them toward islands of wilderness praying for picnics that might not be found. Seeing that he had put the car in the fast lane, he slowed to gradually move himself and his family through the banshee traffic until they were idling along at an almost reasonable fifty miles an hour. The scents of flowers and trees that blew in the window made his move worthwhile. He laughed at nothing at all and said:

«Sometimes, when I get this far out, I think let's just keep driving, never go back to the damned city.»

«Let's drive a hundred miles,» shouted his son.

«A thousand!» cried his daughter.

«A thousand!» said Clarence Travers. «But one slow mile at a time.» And then said, softly, «Hey!»

And as suddenly as if they had dreamed it up, the lost highway came into view. «Wonderful!» said Mr. Clarence Travers.

«What?» asked the children.

«Look!» said Clarence Travers, leaning over his wife, pointing. «That's the Old road. The one they used a long time ago.»

«That?» said his wife.

«It's awfully small,» said his son.

«Well, there weren't many cars then, they didn't need much.»

«It looks like a big snake,» said his daughter.

«Yeah, the old roads used to twist and turn, all right. Remember?»

Cecelia Travers nodded. The car had slowed and they gazed over at that narrow concrete strip with the green grass buckling it gently here or there and sprays of wildflowers nestling up close to either side and the morning sunlight coming down through the high elms and maples and oaks that led the way toward the forest.

«I know it like the nose on my face,» said Clarence Travers. «How would you like to ride on it?»

«Oh, Clarence, now?»

«I mean it.»

«Oh, Daddy, could we?»

«All right, we'll do it,» he said decisively.

«We can't!» said Cecelia Travers. «It's probably against the law. It can't be safe.»

But before his wife could finish, he turned off the freeway and let all the swift cars rush on while he drove, smiling at each bump, down over a small ditch, toward the old road.

«Clarence, please! we'll be arrested!»

«For going ten miles an hour on a highway nobody uses anymore? Let's not kick over any beehives, it's too nice a day. I'll buy you all soda pops if you behave.»

They reached the old road.

«See how simple? Now which way, kids?»

«That way, that way!»

«Easy as pie!»

And he let the car take them away on the old highway, the great white-gray boa constrictor that lashed now slowly this way in green moss-velvet meadows, looped over gentle hills, and lowered itself majestically into caves of moist-smelling trees, through the odor of cricks and spring mud and crystal water that rustled like sheets of cellophane over small stone falls. They drove slow enough to see the waterspiders' enigmatic etchings on quiet pools behind dams of last October's leaves.

«Daddy, what are those?»

«What, the water-skaters? No one has ever caught one. You wait and wait and put your hand out and bang! The spider's gone. They're the first things in life you can't grab onto. The list gets bigger as you grow old, so start small. Don't believe in them. They're not really there.»

«It's fun thinking they are.»

«You have just stated a deep philosophical truth. Now, drive on, Mr. Travers.» And obeying his own command with good humor, he drove on.

And they came to a forest that had been like November all through the winter and now, reluctantly, was putting out green flags to welcome the season. Butterflies in great tosses of confetti leaped from the deeps of the forest to ramble drunkenly on the air, their thousand torn shadows following over grass and water.

«Let's go back now,» said Cecelia Travers.

«Aw, Mom,» said the son and daughter.

«Why?» said Clarence Travers. «My God, how many kids back in that damned hot town can say they drove on a road nobody else has used in years? Not one! Not one with a father brave enough to cross a little grass to take the old way. Right?»

Mrs. Travers lapsed into silence.

«Right there,» said Clarence Travers, «over that hill, the highway turns left, then right, then left again, an S curve, and another S. Wait and see.»

«Left.»

«Right.»

«Left.»

«An S curve.»

The car purred.

«Another S!»

«Just like you said!»

«Look.» Clarence Travers pointed. A hundred yards across the way from them, the freeway suddenly appeared for a few yards before it vanished, screaming behind stacks of playing-card billboards. Clarence Travers stared fixedly at it and the grass between it and this shadowed path, this silent place like the bottom of an old stream where tides used to come but came no more, where the wind ran through nights making the old sound of far traffic.

«You know something,» said the wife. «That freeway over there scares me.»

«Can we drive home on this old road instead, Dad?» said the son.

«I wish we could.»

«I've always been scared,» said the wife, watching that other traffic roaring by, gone before it arrived.

«We're all afraid,» said Clarence Travers. «But you pay your money and take your chance. Well?»

His wife sighed. «Damn, get back on that dreadful thing.»

«Not quite yet,» said Clarence Travers and drove to reach a small, very small village, all quite unexpected, a settlement no more than a dozen white clapboard houses mossed under giant trees, dreaming in a green tide of water and leaf-shadow, with wind shaking the rocking chairs on weathered porches and dogs sleeping in the cool nap of grass-carpeting at noon, and a small general store with a dirty red gas pump out front.

They drew up there and got out and stood, unreal in the sudden lack of motion, not quite accepting these houses lost in the wilderness.

The door to the general store squealed open and an old man stepped out, blinked at them, and said, «Say, did you folks just come down that old road?»

Clarence Travers avoided his wife's accusing eyes. «Yes, sir.»

«No one on that road in twenty years.»

«We were out for a lark,» said Mr. Travers. «And found a peacock,» he added.

«A sparrow,» said his wife.

«The freeway passed us by, a mile over there, if you want it,» said the old man. «When the new road opened, this town just died on the vine. We got nothing here now but people like me. That is: old.»

«Looks like there'd be places here to rent.»

«Mister, just walk in, knock out the bats, stomp the spiders, and any place is yours for thirty bucks a month. I own the whole town.»