How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will barrel up Highway 100 (Highway 100 is the worst), having missed my turn, heading unwillingly for Manitoba, and knowing that the only solution to my plight is to barrel right on down it again. Heraclitus knew a thing or two; the way up and the way down are one and the same, and they are equally terrifying.
Then there are the other idiots, whose reactions are surely no swifter, but who lack the self-knowledge to admit it. These are the ones who drive as though the rapture has already occurred, or at least as though they have lost all fear of death. (In case of rapture, can I have your car?) Other folk suffer from what the amiable Augustine termed superbia and the late and somewhat less amiable Andrea Dworkin called phallocentricity (sed de mortuis nil nisi binkum).
These include the sort of tow-truck operator, from what is so aptly named a wrecker service, who can blithely remove your car from its appointed parking space without cause in the middle of the night (and in serious contravention of the Fourth Amendment protection against search and seizure), and heave it down the highway to a fastness on the far side of Lyndale, whence it is released after a whole day spent on the telephone, with the barest minimum of apology.
I suppose I should be thankful that American drivers are at least predictable. If the other idiots are British, things are twice as bad; the way that my fellow countrymen demonstrate their wit and originality by tailgating on the M4 at seventy-plus miles per hour is enough (in the expression of my father, a medical man) to cause a rush of cold faeces to the left ventricle.
But worse than the horrors of driving on them are the effects of freeways on the countryside that they carve up, the way they turn the ups and downs of a real journey into a blind swoosh of naked concrete. Imagine, then, my joy to find recently, returning from delivering a lecture in the deep south (that is, halfway to Iowa), that it is possible to pick one’s way across the landscape on one of the original roads of Minnesota. This particular road has its origins in an Indian trail stabilized in 1853 by navigators under a militia officer called Dodd. Little is known about Captain Dodd, but he liked a drink and lies buried in the churchyard of the Episcopal Church in St. Peter (where three or four are gathered together, so Episcopalians say, you will always find a fifth).
It took the gallant captain and his crew a whole Minnesota road-building season (the time of year elsewhere known as summer) to build the Dodd Road. In some places, alas, the fruit of their labors has been turned into six-lane highway; elsewhere, in some southern suburbs, it is pleasingly bordered by McMansions and the sort of lawns that seem to imitate Astroturf. (When will this happy landscape find its Betjeman?) Yet there are stretches where Dodd Road is a real country lane with grit, ditches, and dandelions. I look forward to teasing further reaches of this thoroughfare out of the Minnesota terrain—it will be quite like looking for Roman roads at home.
Not least among the joys of the jolly film Sideways were its roadside vistas, particularly those with vines marching up and down the California hills. More so than any of its human characters, this film’s truly Big Star, as far as the wine trade is concerned, is the Pinot Noir grape. All of the ambient publicity ensured that this variety, the grape from which the famous red wines of burgundy have been made since the Middle Ages, became the next grape that everyone wants to drink, following in the wake of White Zinfandel, Chardonnay, and Merlot.
There is a snag. Pinot Noir is hard to grow; not all of it turns into wine as grand as the great vintages of Burgundy. It may well be as mellow as Merlot (and a lot mellower than Cabernet Sauvignon), but it can sometimes lack body. Allow me, then, to recommend a real pleasure, Mark West Central Coast Pinot Noir 2003, a pellucid red made by people who have long specialized in this variety. Costing just around ten dollars locally, it has a fruity flavor leading to a taste of black pepper and then to a rising aroma of elderflowers (the fresh ones you smell by the roadside, not the more sugary sensations of elderflower cordial). It gave tomato and basil soup an added mileage ingredient. And the following morning, the little that was left over had a noble structure, even after the more evanescent scents had evaporated. Take some along on a summer picnic.
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