There was a green water tower, and below it maybe thirty roofs, and in a yard on the near side of the road a woman was hanging sheets on a line. That is the whole memory. I was doing sixty two because of a curve, and the entire town lasted about nine seconds, and it has been in my head for four years.
I did not stop. There was no reason not to. I was not late for anything, I had three quarters of a tank, and it was two in the afternoon. I just did not lift my foot, and by the time I thought about it seriously I was a mile and a half past and there was no turnaround, and then it was five miles, and then it was not worth it.
I write about stopping. That is more or less the whole thing I do. And the honest accounting is that I drive past almost everything.
The one with the water tower
I have never been able to explain why that particular one stuck. It was not remarkable. Green tower, grain bins, a road going off to the left with a stop sign at it.
The best I can figure is the laundry. A woman doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary afternoon, entirely uninterested in the highway going past her yard, which is exactly the relationship most people in these places have with the road. I was going somewhere and she was living somewhere, and for nine seconds those two facts were about forty feet apart.
Everything I imagine about that town is invented. I have caught myself building it out over the years, giving it a diner it may not have, a school it may have lost. That invention is a bad habit and I am not sure I can break it. It is what a mind does with an incomplete image.
The reasons I do not stop
When I actually examine them, most are weak.
The real one, almost always, is momentum. A car at speed is a decision that has already been made and stopping is a decision you have to make again from scratch. The exit comes up in four seconds and defaulting to nothing is free.
Second is the fear of an anticlimax. Some part of me knows the town under the water tower is probably one street and a closed post office, and that seeing it will replace something with something smaller.
Third, and I am least comfortable with this one, is a kind of self consciousness. Thirty roofs is small enough that a stranger parked on the street is an event. I have felt that in places and I have not always liked it. It is easier to admire a town at sixty two.
None of those are good reasons. They are just the reasons.
The arithmetic of stopping
Here is the thing nobody tells you when they encourage you to slow down and see the country. A real stop costs about ninety minutes. Not fifteen. You have to park, walk, find whatever is there, wait for somebody to be free enough to talk, eat if there is anywhere to eat, and get back.
On a four hundred mile day you get maybe two of those, three if you have nowhere to be. So a driving day is not a question of whether to stop, it is a question of which two out of the forty settlements you will pass. Thirty eight get nothing.
That arithmetic is the actual subject. Not stopping is not a failure of curiosity, it is a budget. What bothers me is not that I skip places, it is that I usually skip them without choosing, by default, because the exit came and went while I was thinking about something else.
Going back does not work
I have tried, twice, to return to a town I drove past and could not stop thinking about.
The first was a place on a two lane road with a row of stone buildings that caught late sun in a way I could not get out of my head. I planned a route through it eight months later. I stopped. I walked the row. They were four buildings, not eight, and two were storage. I had an average cup of coffee and stood in the sun for a while and felt the memory get overwritten by something smaller and duller.
The second time went better but taught the same lesson. What I had been carrying around was not the town, it was a particular ninety seconds of light and speed and mood, and that is not something a place can hold for you until you get back.
So I have stopped planning returns. If a road takes me through again, good. If not, the memory can stay wrong.
What passing through is actually for
I want to defend it a little, because I think driving past has its own value and we talk about it only as a failure.
At speed you see the shape of a region. Where the trees stop. Where the fields change crop, where the fences get better or worse, where houses start having second stories again. You see which towns sit at crossroads and which sit on a river and which were clearly laid out by a railroad in a straight line with the tracks as the spine. You cannot see any of that from inside a town. It only exists at scale, and you only get scale by moving.
The forty towns I pass in a day are data even when they are nine seconds each. The two I stop in are stories. I need both, and I would not trade the drive for a series of stops any more than I would trade the stops for a pure drive.
The compromise I have settled on
One rule, and I keep it maybe seventy percent of the time.
If a place makes me look twice, I take the next legal turnaround. Not the next exit, the next turnaround, which usually means four to six miles and a farm road and a slightly nervous three point turn. That six mile penalty is the price of the rule and it is what makes it work, because it is small enough to pay and large enough that I only pay it when something actually registered.
The other thirty percent of the time I keep driving and I know within about a minute that I have made a small mistake. That feeling is specific and I have come to trust it more than any of my systems for evaluating a town from the road.
I never took the turnaround for the water tower. That was before the rule, which is the story I tell myself. The truth is I probably would have kept going anyway. Some places you are just going to pass, and the honest version of this whole hobby is that the road is mostly made of them.