Country Life: Ghosts on the Road

IN the winter I have a clear view through the bare trees of my dirt driveway, all the way to the road. Hardly any strange cars come down it except those of Jehovah’s Witnesses, so when one appeared I went out the door wondering whom I would meet. The driver said he lived up the road (it’s a long road), and heard that I wrote about the area. “Sometimes,” I said somewhat encouragingly. “Well, here’s a book about this road.” How can you refuse a book about the road you live on? We chatted, I thanked him, then I looked at my gift.

The book was a memoir, self-printed in a ring binder 20 years ago. The author was not my neighbor, but another man; Google does not reveal whether he is alive, though, based on internal evidence, he might still be. The author’s family moved to what is now my road just after World War I, and ran a summer boarding house for city dwellers out of their farmhouse. I have been in that very house; we stopped there once for a yard sale, and my wife discovered that a former student of hers now lived in it. It had a big floorplan, as if porches had been walled in, and lots of rooms on the second storey. Whatever fields had been farmed there were long overgrown.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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IN the winter I have a clear view through the bare trees of my dirt driveway, all the way to the road. Hardly any strange cars come down it except those of Jehovah’s Witnesses, so when one appeared I went out the door wondering whom I would meet. The driver said he lived up the road (it’s a long road), and heard that I wrote about the area. “Sometimes,” I said somewhat encouragingly. “Well, here’s a book about this road.” How can you refuse a book about the road you live on? We chatted, I thanked him, then I looked at my gift.

The book was a memoir, self-printed in a ring binder 20 years ago. The author was not my neighbor, but another man; Google does not reveal whether he is alive, though, based on internal evidence, he might still be. The author’s family moved to what is now my road just after World War I, and ran a summer boarding house for city dwellers out of their farmhouse. I have been in that very house; we stopped there once for a yard sale, and my wife discovered that a former student of hers now lived in it. It had a big floorplan, as if porches had been walled in, and lots of rooms on the second storey. Whatever fields had been farmed there were long overgrown.