By BILL CHAISSON
In the U.S. Virgin Islands nearly all the vehicles are American-made but the territory inherited the British convention of driving in the left lane. When you rent a car, they tell to remember that if you can reach out and touch the flowers, you’re on the correct side of the road.
I think about this advice sometimes when I am driving on any two-lane road in the U.S., but I now conflate it with being told to “stop and smell the roses.” I’ve driven back and forth – east and west and north and south – across North America several times. Many years ago, inspired in part of William Least Heat Moon’s travel book “Blue Highways” I began avoiding the interstate highways.
The difference is especially striking in the Midwest. If you drive across Iowa on I-80, you’ll never know the joys of Archie’s Waeside in Lemars, because it’s on State Route 3, which parallels I-80, but on Rt. 3 you get to look up at the corn instead of down on it.
Claremont is a city, like Lemars, where several two-laners come together. When I was a kid, we got off I-91 and took Route 12 straight through the middle of town. We felt like we were being locals when we took a short cut on Water Street between Main and Broad streets.
At some point in the not too distant past the signage was changed and North Street was upgraded to create a bypass around downtown Claremont. It is an example of American belief that time is money, so let’s help everyone get from A to B as quickly as possible. That planning decision treated downtown Claremont as if it were a traffic flow impediment rather than an interesting place where a traveler might like to pause for a bite to eat.
In the case of Claremont, it would be nice if travelers at the junction of North Street and Rt. 12 encountered signs that told them that if they drove straight ahead instead of taking a left up the hill, they would be driving through a (historic) downtown. I’m not fond of the term “shopping district,” as there is so much more to downtown life than shopping, but it must be admitted that this is a term that most Americans understand.
This kind of signage already exists at the junction of North and Washington streets.
I look forward to the completion of the ongoing renovations of various downtown Claremont buildings. It is so important that people live in downtowns. When people passing through see the local folks hanging out, they are more likely to stop and find out what is going on.
Claremonters probably don’t think of themselves as exotic and fascinating to travelers, but they are. The tricky part of tourism is to remember that you’re living in an exotic place and also remember to be cool about it.
We all need to slow down a bit, and taking two-laners and driving through downtowns is one way to do it. When you slow down and drive through small towns, you realize that they are different enough to be interesting and similar enough to be comforting. You also realize that most folks are actually pretty nice, that “American food” can be extremely tasty, and that you really didn’t lose anything by not taking the fastest route. In fact, you might have found something you didn’t know you were looking for.
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