Corduroy Roads, Take me Home

Photo from Google Images

This past weekend, my family and I settled into Caer David, our weekend cabin at my parents place.  Our extended family had gathered from afar to spend a few days together visiting and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday.  We shot trap, ran 4-wheelers and played spoons.  We ate bountiful meals together and talked into the wee hours of the morning.  We made new memories and recounted old ones while babies slept and children played.

One afternoon, Maid Elizabeth and Miss Serenity and I went for a walk in the wilderness behind my parents home.  As we hiked on old, forgotten logging roads, we came upon a relic of another era - a corduroy road.  The road was little more than a remnant of rotten old growth timber, but it stood as a testament to the ingenuity and tenacity of the men who had built this country.

Corduroy roads are an old-fashioned remnant of the past.  Years ago, when men needed to move freight (or people) through marshy, boggy, low-lying lands, they built corduroy roads.  They would fell small trees, about 8 to 10 inches in diameter, cut the branches off and lay the trees perpendicular to the roadway.  These roads were usually built in small runs, through the boggy areas of an otherwise solid road.  Corduroy roads were an ingenious solution to a real-world problem, invented by men who depended upon their own resourcefulness.

I was 8 years old when I saw my first corduroy road.  My parents and I were walking behind our back creek on the property my folks had recently bought when we stumbled upon decaying logs on an OLD logging track.  My brother and I ran from one end of the small run of corduroy road to the other trying to figure out what it was.  Who would build such a thing in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere?  And what in the world was it?

Soon, we had our answer.  King, our elderly neighbor, who's parents had homesteaded our land, had helped build those roads as a child.  King's father had logged our property, using horses, nearly 100 years before.  The land has creeks and marshy areas, along with bogs and springs.  King's dad had built a bridge over the creek, using his team of horses to skid old growth Douglas Fir to span the distance so that he could access the timber on the other side.  Once he reached the far side of the creek, he realized that the ground between the creek and the timber was marshy and too wet to haul wagons loaded with logs.  And so, with his son by his side, he built his very own corduroy road.  Log by log, King and his father laid a road born of necessity, a road built by pioneers, both in spirit and truth.

I stood, gazing at that long-forgotten road and realized that it summed up the very values that had been instilled in me since childhood - self-reliance, ingenuity, resourcefulness.  That corduroy road, in its decomposing beauty, encapsulated all that was good and true in our country - in our people.

And now I watch the decomposing beauty of our crumbling society and quietly pray "Corduroy roads, take us home to the place we belong".

A Nation Undone

We are a nation seeking liberty. But not the liberty that you would think.  Although we will tell you that we are freedom loving, ruggedly independent, hard working, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of folks, nothing could be further from the truth.  We are a nation of mere peasants, offering obeisance to the king in exchange for scraps from his table.

Oh, we seek liberty, but not the liberty to be free from the constraints of tyranny.  We seek the liberty to collect regular welfare payments, state provided health care and housing assistance.  We scream foul about not being part of the "1%"  while refusing to rouse ourselves from in front of the television long enough to hold down a job.  We bellyache and complain about government spending and frivolous excess, while we mortgage our souls for new cars and designer handbags.

It is easy to look at our leaders and blame the mess that is our nation on them.  But they are nothing more than a microcosm of "we the people".  We are an undisciplined, self-indulgent generation who demands to have it's cake and eat it, too.  We hold our government to a standard that we do not expect of ourselves.

This cannot be.  The only way to right a nation is to right its people.  The responsibility for this nation is yours.  And it's mine.  If we intend to become slaves, we are well on our way.  When we give up the liberty of maintaining our own employment or paying our own debt and instead rely on the "king" to provide for us, we have moved from the realm of freeman to the realm of slave.  When we accept "benefits" and "assistance" from the state, we give the state authority over our person.  And that authority comes with too high a price.

We ought to be a nation seeking liberty. But we need to be seeking the liberty to make our own way, make our own mistakes and work through our own consequences.  If we expect our leaders to guide this country with wisdom and discipline then we need to live our lives with wisdom and discipline.  And then, perhaps, we can begin to heal a Nation Undone.