The Road Not Taken

 “Now which way do you think is the best way out of here?” the older gentleman, in a plaid button down with sleeves rolled up to expose his bony forearms, asked in a thick New England accent. The group he’d brought in with him, particularly his wife, a woman with sharp-cropped silver hair, had no qualms with exposing their origins, going on about how they were coming or going from the Cape and had been planning to stop here all summer. The man made it clear that they were traveling with friends, one in particular with a bad back, who couldn’t handle the bumps in the road.

The question of which side of the road to take comes up a lot. Any day we’re open, the store has more than a few carloads of customers and the state of our dirt road is a topic of casual conversation. The tree-enclosed thoroughfare, picturesque on a sunny day in any season, does possess a fairytale quality, with limbs of maples and white pines hanging across the bumpy path, letting in shimmers of sunlight between the leaves and branches, en route to the hidden treasure that is our beloved Owl Pen.

However, our road, once named Riddell after a family who at one point owned much of the surrounding land, then, through misspellings and over time, changed to Riddle Road, is far less enchanting when you spend each day navigating its bumps and potholes.

In regard to our customers out on a leisurely day trip, we often find ourselves in accord with Robert Frost in recommending the “road not taken.” Like the American poet’s immortalization of his walks through the woods, we recommend the less traversed stretch of dirt and rocks. But this is not for a whim of adventure (though that end of the road is notably steeper with a few blind curves), no, but merely because you’re less likely to blow a tire making your way back to civilization. We want our customers coming and going safely, all Subarus and Priuses intact. However, the questions of navigation do not speak to the larger “riddle” of how to fix the road.

Riddle Road is a public road and not a private driveway. The Town of Greenwich is responsible for its upkeep. During winter snowfall the Highway Department plows and, after a major rainstorm, repairs any washed out sections, removes fallen trees, etc. Generally, this type of maintenance is conducted with sufficient expediency. To answer a question we frequently get, we are rarely, if ever, snowed in up here at the Owl Pen.

That said, the larger, more forward-thinking projects are another story. A dirt road like ours needs to be significantly graded every few years, shaped so that rainwater drains off the sides into ditches. Culverts must be repaired or strategically inserted in spots prone to flooding. Gravel and fill need to be dumped on top and packed in hard to eliminate the dangerous potholes that appear during mud season. Over the three years of our tenure operating Owl Pen, it’s become clear this upkeep, essential for our road, falls below other projects on larger, more traveled roads in terms of priority. Instead, twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, some trucks are rolled out to spread some dirt and rocks around to fill gaps or holes. This always reminds me of how my grandfather, whenever we scraped our knees playing out in the backyard as kids, told us to just “rub some dirt on it.” If you know anything about how mud works, then you can imagine just how fast the potholes return. Two or three rainfalls and Riddle Road is a mess once again.

Now you might be saying, “Why don’t you just call the town and tell them to come fix the road?” Well, here, folks, is where we must take that dreaded oft-travelled path into politics. Hey, ‘tis the season!

Sydney and I had been periodically calling Our Man Stan for the last year, leaving polite messages to no avail. You see, Stan is the Town Highway Superintendent, who, incidentally, just happens to live a few roads over and is very rarely able to pay us a visit or respond to our calls. Now, let’s be clear, Our Man Stan is good people. The times we’ve spoken on the phone or when he’s dropped by, we’ve found him to be more than polite and reasonable. Lovely guy. On multiple occasions when we have connected, he’s given assurances that they’d be coming within a few weeks with his road crew, once there was break in the rainy weather or they had completed some project on the other side of town.

On a side note, when we first arrived here Sydney and I had promised ourselves we would become active in the community, and we attended some local political meetings. At one of these meetings, I was asked to perform music at a fundraiser for the new Highway Superintendent candidate in the village of Greenwich. It was there that I first met Our Man Stan. There wasn’t much to his campaign, really. They had the yard signs that read “Vote Our Man Stan.” The whole race seemed to hinge on one argument for electing him over the incumbent, and that was the fact that Stan didn’t have a job. Really, that was the gist of it. The incumbent had a full-time gig working for National Grid while he was Highway Superintending on the side. Unlike that dude, Stan the Man could devote all his time and energy to the job of keeping the roads of Greenwich safe for drivers. That was the pitch to voters. In one of my first brushes with the realities of small-town life, I remember finishing my thirty-minute set of songs at his fundraiser, packing up my guitar and amp, and walking next door to the only restaurant open in the village. When I sat down and ordered a drink at the bar, I began chatting with a woman sitting nearby about how I had just performed at a political benefit next door. She turned out to be the daughter of the incumbent Highway Superintendent. I asked her if she thought the job required someone to not have another job, if it was that time-consuming. She said her father seemed to manage just fine. I asked her if she thought there needed to be political parties involved in this type of position. “Of course not!” was her reply.

Foolishly, when Our Man Stan won the election, I thought that donating my services to his campaign might get us some access, or at the very least bump us up on the list of roads that get plowed first when it snows. No such luck. Our Man Stan keeps things fair. 

So this spring when we first opened for the season, after a few calls to Stan hadn’t been returned and the potholes were testing the suspension on our vehicles, we thought we’d take the extra step of calling the town clerk to say that we’d like to place Riddle Road on the agenda for the upcoming Town Council meeting. To our surprise, within an hour or so, we received calls from the head of the Town Council and from Stan the Man himself, informing us that the issue of our road was something he was planning on addressing and there would be no need for us to attend the meeting.

In small towns like ours, word travels fast. It didn’t take long to hear about the drama that had ensued at that meeting we didn’t attend. Apparently, a neighbor from the opposite end of Riddle had come to make a stink and let it be known that Stan and his crew had been neglecting them for years, and if they had no plans of widening and grading the road that a group of long-term residents were prepared to get out there and do it themselves. Our Man Stan pointed out that if they touched the road, they’d be breaking the law. (This is true. You can receive a severe fine. I had to talk one neighbor down our way out of digging his own culvert.) This didn’t go over too well, and things got heated and it nearly came to fisticuffs under the fluorescent lights of the town office meeting room. From a reliable source, I heard the men had to be held back from one another, but eventually a truce was called, peace was made, and the two shook hands. The understanding, as we were later informed, was that Stan had the budget and manpower for two major dirt-road projects this year, and one of them would be Riddle Road. This gave us hope.

I think it must be said here that violence, political or otherwise, is never the answer to any problem. But this near fistfight at the town council meeting apparently helped set things in motion. Almost immediately Stan and his crew came by and did their initial pass of dumping dirt over the potholes on our end of Riddle, and within a month some heavier reconstruction and grading began on the other end. We could tell this was happening because one day we woke to find a number of rollers, excavators, and trucks parked in a clearing on our property just up from the Owl Pen parking lot. No dudes in hard hats or neon orange vests appeared knocking at our door to let us know. But to be honest, we were just so happy to have Our Man Stan taking this much of an interest in our road that we kept our mouths shut.

Just before these construction vehicles mysteriously appeared, Stan had paid us a visit to confirm his plans for the spring and summer. I remember him asking us if it would be okay if he cut some skinny trees in the right of way along the road on our property. Of course we told him that was fine. Anything he had to do to get the road in better shape was fine by us. He was relieved to hear it. He explained that a few of our neighbors down the way had given him hell about moving dirt and stones from the side of the road that was technically their property. That seemed nuts to us, and he agreed. It’s as if these older residents wanted progress but didn’t want anything to change. He said there were others in that direction that wanted their section of the road paved in order to have mail delivered, but that they didn’t understand even if there was money in the budget for that, the road isn’t wide enough, and his crew would have to take out some of those 200-year-old historic stone walls to make room. None of the older folks were going to advocate for more taxes to pay for the project and again, people don’t want to change anything. All of this to say, Stan was doing what he could with what he had. No matter what he did, no one was going to be happy.

This was the same case for his predecessor, and before that, his father Stan Senior. Oh yeah, Our Man Stan is not the first in his family line to be Greenwich Highway Superintendent. Our friend Edie Brown, the previous owner of the Owl Pen, told us that her husband Hank used to have harsh words with the original Stan over the phone on a regular basis. I’ve been told by reliable neighbors that Hank was one tough son of a bitch even well into his 80s and I wonder if, back in the day, the published botanist/Skidmore professor/used bookseller ever had to duke it out with Old Man Stan to get Riddle Road graded.

Trusted sources have confirmed that Hank and the original owner Barbara Probst both fought petitioned movements by residents to pave Riddle Road over the years. Just chatting with the neighbors about the recent road work, we can sense there’s still a small contingent of folks wishing the town would lay some black top over Riddle. Our personal arguments against the idea are clear: the lack of funding, the logistical nightmare of the task, and most importantly to us, how it would diminish the charming remoteness of our literally off-the-beaten-path bookstore. So that leaves us back at square one, dependent on the town for the regular upkeep and repair of our road. That leaves us with Our Man Stan.

After the rollers, excavators, and trucks were used to work on the far side of Riddle Road toward Route 49, they sat on our property for nearly two months over the summer. Each morning, we kept hoping to wake to find Stan and his crew out using all that equipment to tackle the rest of the road, the side most Owl Pen customers come down to get to us from Christie Road. But instead, one day we woke to find all the machines gone.

That is …all but one roller. It sits alone in a field adjacent to the store. It’s not obtrusive in any way, and most customers would miss it if they weren’t looking with a discerning eye. Even after the town’s semi-annual dirt dump in late September, the roller remained. 

I like to think Our Man Stan left it as a promise not only that he’ll be back one day, but as a promise that we’ll be on his mind. And to me, that’s a promise that government still works in this country, even when it’s in dire need of more tax-dollar funding. Because come winter, Stan will be out early with his crew plowing every town road equally regardless of whether the people who live on them voted for him in the last election, or even if they tried to sock him in the face at a town meeting. As we all understand, this requires a certain level of trust in our imperfect union and our seemingly, at times, broken system. It’s a faith in the road less taken.

This August we had an unprecedented storm come through that had made its way up from the hurricanes in the south, with extremely high winds and buckets of rain for hours. Part of our driveway washed out, our cellar flooded, and of course so did parts of Riddle Road. An entire chunk of earth surrounding a culvert across from Owl Pen had collapsed, leaving a pit that any driver, especially at night, could have rolled into, causing a severe accident. I placed a garbage can out in front of the ditch. Sydney emailed Stan immediately that afternoon. He didn’t respond. But by the next morning a crew arrived and had the hole filled within a few hours. And that gives us hope.