John Krull| The Statehouse File
ON THE ROAD The state highway twists and turns like a piece of tangled string.
Im in eastern Illinois. Id come over to the small town in western Indiana where my late brother once worked to settle some of his affairs.
It also was a town where we lived with my grandfather for a summer when I was a boy, more than 50 years ago. I parked near the news stand/soda fountain Grandpa used to take me to when I was in elementary school.
I left the town haunted by memories of my brother, my grandfather and my own young self. I ambled the streets there thinking of moments good and bad Id shared with them when they both walked this earth and I strolled beside them.
Then I did what I so often have done when the past troubles me.
I hit the road and let the miles covered help me sort things out.
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Im headed to St. Louis, a city where I passed a formative part of my young manhood. Im going to hang out with old friends and reconnect with an earlier life.
But theres no hurry in getting there. Instead of barreling toward the interstate, I seek out the old roads and point the car west. I drive over small state highways, past fields that were farms when my grandfather was a child. The heavy rains of the past few weeks have started to turn the grass to that deep green that occurs in the heart of spring.
Grief is a strange thing. It attunes one to loss to the things and people that depart, to the pieces of ones own life that come to live only in memory.
When my grandfather was a boy, land such as this was America. Ours was a rural, agrarian society then. All his ancestors had lived on farms and drawn their livings from the earth.
He was part of the generation that changed that.
He burned with an eagerness to learn. He worked his way through college, often walking more than 30 miles from his family home in the hills of southern Indiana to the small liberal arts school where he got his degree.
In the process, he charted a different course for those who followed him. His grandchildren went on to become CEOs, corporate executives, ministers, nurses, lawyers, teachers and, yes, writers.
The wheels roll. I cruise past a farm with an antique tractor parked near an ancient barn and a cell tower in a field adjacent to the house.
As the clich goes, the only constant in life is change.
My brother balanced himself uneasily between our birth familys rural past and urban and suburban present. He graduated from a major university and earned a law degree from the same August institution. When he was young, he sought out the challenges cities presented.
But small towns always spoke to him. He spent the bulk of his career as a reporter and editor for a series of small daily newspapers. The rhythms of life in old and tightly knit communities touched parts of him that nothing else could.
He and I took road trips together. I think of him now as my car glides through the Midwestern countryside. I recall his gift for wry asides and the joy he took in seeing something new or unexpected.
I also think about my grandfather and my apprentice road voyages in the back seat of his old Buick. He liked to talk as he drove. Some of the most fundamental truths I know I first heard as he wheeled us from place to place.
I still can hear his voice, higher pitched than mine with a slow southern Indiana accent.
As my car glides through a small town that seems asleep on this late afternoon, I wonder what my grandfather would make of the world we now inhabit. I ponder the paths that led him away from the farm and my brother back to small towns.
Thats the thing about journeys. No matter how much we plan, they always take us to places we couldnt entirely expect.
The road in front of me presents a sweeping turn through a small stand of trees.
I motor on, eager, as always, to see what lies around the bend and where the voyage will take me.
John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher ofTheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
Read more here:
Krull: Working through grief on the back roads of America - The Herald-Times
