Back Roads

Rodney Atkins has capitalized on an individual’s desire to take a road less traveled with his chart topping performance of the single "Take a Back Road" written by Rhett Akins and Luke Laird. Though the song has a catchy beat and rhythmic phrasing that just makes you want to smile. The sentiment is what made this song a chart topper in 2011 when it was released.

reinig road, a back road through town

The back road and the scenic route are synonymous to some element in most of us. It is an element of American-ness, I say this since I am American however it's in most all of us from Timbuktu to Toronto, from Sapporo to Sao Paulo, it is the element in so many of us that clings to an earlier way of life, that small element within us that strives to be our own great adventurer, discoverer, entrepreneur, survivor and leader. The part of us that pushes us, strives to make us find our own path and road through this world.

It has been over two hundred years since Meriwether Lewis and Clark set for to discover as President Thomas Jefferson put it "the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce." Which in today’s world is the air and highways, don't get me started on America's idiotically shortsighted destruction of the railroad system.

Yet I have digressed. What I started out trying to say was this; there is a small part of most all of us that has an overwhelming desire to take the dirt roads. Be it Atkins back roads, symbolizing a simpler way of life, or even Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” symbolizing an individual’s own unique calling, be it the harder and rougher journey or not. Both of which inexplicably appeal to  us, call to us to be ourselves, in touch with our world and living a simpler way of life.