Time and Weather Take a Toll

The Montauk and I rode a long-ago memorized loop of historic country roads yesterday. It was sad to see that Winter had been so unkind to these aged friends.

Like faces wrinkled by age, sun and wind, Old Route 13 and Clough Park Road were a sea of undulated cracks, agape with pitted skin pulled tight over their once rounded -- now peaked -- crown. Not even a decade of serial mini-quakes (the kind we get in New Hampshire) would have sundered the tar this badly.

I was heartbroken. What had for years been one of my favorite afternoon cruising routes, winding through the hills and towns of Goffstown, Dunbarton, around Clough Park and Everett Lake, down to Weare, and then back to Goffstown, now resembled more a gravelized motocross track than a road.

Many of the important things in these townships thankfully remain the same. The farms still smell alive. The fields and ponds still surround me with panoramic beauty. The hills still rise and fall beneath the turning wheels of the Montauk. All is well in the world on such days.

I just wish that time and weather could be kinder to our little country roads.