Roadside Moments

The Long Way Home

The efficient route home takes thirty-four minutes. I took the one that takes fifty-two, and I cannot tell you exactly why, except that I was not ready to arrive.

There is a county road that loops south before bending back north toward town. It adds eighteen minutes on a good day, more if you get behind a slow tractor or stop at the crossroads where an old church sits in a field like it was placed there for contemplation. I know this road the way you know a paragraph you have read aloud many times — not because it is remarkable, but because the rhythm is pleasing.

Choosing extra miles for no reason that makes sense on paper is one of those behaviors I used to feel mildly guilty about. Fuel, time, the small environmental arithmetic of unnecessary driving. The guilt has faded. What remains is curiosity about my own motives, which are never as simple as procrastination, though procrastination is part of it. Arriving ends the drive. I am not always ready for the drive to end.

The long way home passes through a landscape the highway bypasses entirely — farmhouses set back from the road, mailboxes with names I have learned without meaning to, a bridge over a creek that floods in spring and turns the approach into a shallow lake. None of this is on the way to anywhere I need to be. That is precisely the point. The long way is not inefficient. It is elective. It is a choice to inhabit space without the justification of destination.

I have taken this detour in every emotional register: relieved, restless, content, quietly devastated. The road receives all of it without distinction. The creek does not care why I am driving slowly across the bridge. The church does not ask whether I am avoiding home or approaching it with more care. This neutrality is a gift. The long way does not interpret me. It simply holds the miles.

There is a theory that we extend journeys when we need transition time — a buffer between one version of ourselves and the next. Home is not just a place. It is a set of roles, expectations, the resumed texture of a life that driving temporarily suspends. The car is a room with wheels. The long way home is the hallway between that room and the front door. I need the hallway sometimes. Most people do, I suspect, though they call it different things.

Last week I took the long way and pulled over where the road crests a hill. I could see town in the distance — not clearly, but enough. Lights beginning. The shape of where I live. I sat for perhaps five minutes, engine off, watching. I was not stalling. I was, I think, acknowledging. The long way had done its work. I still was not eager to arrive. But I was ready, which is a different and more honest condition.

I do not take the long way every time. That would make it another routine, another route the body learns without the mind's consent. I take it when the straight road feels too short for what I am carrying. The choice remains mine. The miles remain extra. The reason still does not make sense on paper. It makes sense in the rearview mirror, afterward, when the drive is a memory and home is already behind me again, and I am planning the next way back.