It is right there to see, but circumstances rarely let you look closely enough to notice. As you drive north on Colesville Road, occasionally it is possible to look left or right from your eight-to-twelve lanes of divided highway, and see The Old Road. Two lanes of sometimes residential, sometimes rolling country road, Old Columbia Pike looks like it would have been a delightful drive.
Driving around rural Virginia this week, I slipped back into my old habit of always looking for The Old Road. I first discovered this possibility when, as a kid riding with my dad at the wheel, I noticed that on many stretches of divided highway, one set of lanes would be more level than the other, with deeper cuts through the hills, and more fill elevating it across the valleys. That was clearly the newer half of the highway that had been added to the original two lanes; the part that rose, fell, and curved more dramatically was The Old Road.
Sometimes The Old Road would have some other rewarding feature. Out on Leesburg Pike in the countryside beyond Tysons Corner, there was a place as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago where eastbound two-lane curved down into the vale and crossed Goose Creek on an old steel-truss bridge, whereas the westbound lanes stayed straight and high on a concrete overpass. Now I drive that road often, as my parents live not far from it; no longer through countryside but rather thick development, the ten lanes of Route Seven are so engineered and elevated that I have to search to find any evidence of the creek at all.
New highways move more traffic better, but disguise or even destroy characteristics of the topography through which it passes, and sometimes its history as well. Old Valley Pike in the Shenandoah, long supplanted by interstate, has several stretches where yet-older-pike can be seen on one side or another. But I was recently delighted when I left the highway entirely following signs for an out-of-the-way Civil War battlefield; you have to get pretty obscure to find the ones I have never visited. Across the ravine from the little crossroad we were following, I saw a handsome but abandoned building in the trees, and the pattern of snowmelt revealed what looked like a track or lane winding around the hill. Maps at the site of the battle revealed that the Pike itself had followed that same roundabout route back in the day, before roadbuilding equipment allowed them to straighten it up the other side of the hill.
Just south of Staunton, Virginia, heading south on I-81, if you’re alert you can see just off the interstate to your right a beautiful stone bridge with tall, slender arches of remarkable elegance. It is not very long, so it is easy to miss, and too narrow to have carried much of a road, so I long wondered what it served originally. After years or even decades of wondering, I did a little research and found it carried a short branch line of a railroad long defunct. With help from imagery on Google maps and some serious neck-craning searching while driving along the parallel U.S. 11, I found I could track the embankment that stretched several miles through what now is largely pastureland. Why would I bother? Because The Old Road reveals something of the history of the land and its inhabitants even when it is not a road at all that has been supplanted by the modern.
The prophet Isaiah tells us that Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall become straight, and the rough ways plain. (Is 40:4), and that will be a good thing because the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh together shall see. Modern highway construction techniques accomplish more than Isaiah could conceive in his wildest dreams, and new wide, smooth roads get more of us to where we are going, faster, and more safely too, at least in some ways. But the Lord Himself reminds us that the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow, and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few. (Mt 7:13-14). To take our minds off where our car is taking us in that moment, and direct our thoughts rather to who we are and where our life is going, it can help to be attentive to The Old Road.
Monsignor Smith
