e.e. cummings once wrote that “progress is a comfortable disease,” a contention I would not dare have argued with until I witnessed the paving of a certain dirt road in Lancaster County a few years ago. Creek Road fronted the small farm I was living on at the time, and one of the pleasures of walking leisurely along that road was that there was little or no vehicular traffic to distract your thoughts. Then unexpectedly, like a bomb shell, one Saturday morning came a telephone call from the local road supervisor informing D., the owner of the farm, that it had been decided by the State of Pennsylvania that Creek Road, which for the most part parallels the winding of the Octorara Creek, was going to be paved.

Thus came the official word to us. Yes, the automobile owners of the local township were demanding it. The era of at least one tree-lined secluded dirt road would very soon become nothing more than a pleasant memory. Everything for the automobile, we thought. Everything for progress. Everything for the convenience and well-being of the motorist, and nothing for the man who enjoys the privacy of a natural wilderness.

Part of our bank on one side of the road would have to be bulldozed into oblivion and a number of trees growing too close to the road cut down. D., in a fit of justifiable despair, protested against the Harrisburg dictate, which called for a uniform width in all country roads. One very legitimate fear which she had about this was that it would increase the confidence of speeders. Already we were both having nightmares of cars whizzing by our driveway at 50 mph and creating a hazard not only for ourselves but by tenfold for our animals. D. contended that a narrower road plus a curve between the end of our driveway and the old house fifty yards down the road, which the supervisor planned to eliminate, would compel motorists to slow down. But in an age and nation whose divinities are speed and power, it was extremely doubtful that any member of the state highway bureaucracy could be moved by such a proposal. Thus a host of octopus-like arms were soon going to be taunting our privacy, and there was nothing we could do about it other than pack up and move to some off-beat piece of topography where Mr. Monster Motorist did not yet wield the scepter.
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And so goes the world, for two mornings later at around 8 o’clock a man with a chainsaw began exterminating some of our trees. We even thought we heard a few arborial screams. When I later inspected the aftermath on both sides of the road between our mailbox and the covered bridge, I was reminded of a landscape that had recently played host to a battle. At least a dozen trees were lying on their sides amidst honeysuckle and weeds with their intricate entanglements of roots facing the road. A depressing sight indeed.

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A big disruption in our lives had began as soon as the bulldozer started grinding its way back and forth. D. was both sleepless and nerve-shattered, yet I think she felt a little better after having persuaded the supervisor to dump some of the bulldozed dirt behind the other house down the road next to the septic tank so that we could fill in the ditch where the water from the tank emptied. As soon as the first load of dirt was dumped, I began shoveling it into the ditch.

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The bulldozer and mechanical shovel can alter a landscape with amazing alacrity. The change bewilders one mainly because there has been no time to prepare for it. One becomes so accustomed to one’s local landscape that it virtually becomes a part of the family in the same sense that the house one lives in soon develops into a kind of appendage to one’s life. Alter it or produce some drastic change in its physical appearance and one immediately feels as though he has suddenly been thrust into a strange, unfamiliar world. The banished contours are implanted in that part of the memory where all our nostalgic attachments are stored. It lives on as a cherished remembrance much like a beloved member of the family who has died.

And now that our creek road had entered the orbit of progress we were confronted with something new to get used to no matter how disagreeable we found it. Before the actual paving began, the road had to be widened. This was done by scraping the edges and banks on both sides with the blade of the bulldozer. All our flowered banks, to say nothing of the trees, were nudged into oblivion. The road area, including the surgeoned banks, soon resembled a narrow stretch of desert. Consequently, whenever a truck (the construction company had two large dump trucks) or an automobile drove past, a veritable sandstorm burst in on the air. If we were still part of the community, and I assumed that we were, then the benefit which this new project constituted was not altogether on the community’s side, for it blocked our driveway off from the road.

Nevertheless the road builders did offer us all the dirt we wanted to make necessary adjustments. D. decided to plant forsythia all along one side of the road to screen us off from the passing traffic. Then, bending down, she began to marvel at the bright ruddy luster of the clay which had been uncovered by the bulldozer.

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