Natural Paths and Walkways

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Cutting slats with a circular saw

Backyard Projects

Down the garden path in style.

Back in the 1800s when America was expanding west, no sooner did the railroad come to a rowdy frontier settlement or scruffy trading post than the town elders got the urge to citify. One of their first civic improvements was to built boardwalks to protect ladies' skirts and gents' shined boots from the mud roads. Then they took the twists and turns out of the coach road and named it Main Street. Next they paved the road and replaced the old boardwalk with a poured-concrete sidewalkall evenly graded and arrow-straight.

But, have you ever noticed that there are no even grades or straight lines in nature?

To me, sidewalks—straight, flat, rigid, and purposeful—symbolize citymen's relentless urge to civilize: to impose order and efficiency on the lovely curves and chaos of nature.

In contrast, the deer trails and the faint hillside rut that's all that remains of the old Indian path running through my woods keep their curves and seem to meander. But they are as purposeful and efficient as any city sidewalk if you can accept a preindustrial concept of efficiency. They don't impose straight lines and artificial order but take their own "path of least resistance." That path may be longer as it winds along ridges rather than up hills and down gulches, but it guides you gently to travel at a deliberate pace using minimal energy and no technology beyond a soft grass cushion inside a well-stitched moccasin.

Illustrations: Kenneth Lin

A city sidewalk issues orders—telling you where to go and how to get there—and it goads you with its endless straight-out agenda to get there as quick as possible. Hurry, hurry. Where's a cab anyway?

A country path gently lures, beckons, entices, invites you on a leisurely journey where the trip may be more important than the destination. It takes you around big trees and rock outcroppings rather than over or through them. On a country path you almost have to (what's that city-stress-reduction admonition we hear so often)..."Take time to smell the daisies."

Why Paths?

Every country place needs paths to order activity-from road to house, house to garden, garden to barn. A new house will need a whole new network of walkways, and every new family moving into an established dwelling will have its own foottraffic requirements.

But if, like so many of MOTHER'S readers, you've come to the country to escape the sidewalks and find time to smell those daisies, please leave the hard-surface, straight-line city concept of what a path ought to be back in the smog where it belongs.

You'd be surprised at how many new arrivals in our little New England town spend their first weekends of country life reordering their front walks. There's something symbolic about rebuilding that connector between home and road, but I haven't figured out just what it means. These folks try laying concrete or maybe buy a cube of bricks or pavers and a pile of river sand and slap them down right on top of the soil. Or worse, they let themselves be conned by one of the gypsy hottop peddlers that spray out a bubbling mix of used auto oil and tar patch, collect their money, and disappear.