An eye-catching patch of purple milkweed bloomed along a road that meandered through a wooded area. The pink-purple spherical flower formations topped tall stems filled with leaves. Bees crawled over the blooms.
Dark clouds signaled an imminent downpour. I was driving home when, on the side of the road before me, I noticed a large shape that did not look like the usual clump of leaves or litter. Maybe it was a chunk of pavement from one of the potholes or fraying edges of the road. As I inched closer, I saw that it was actually a bullfrog, a likely resident of the nearby pond. Using his exceedingly long legs, he launched himself into the overgrown ditch and into seclusion and safety.
Roads themselves are notoriously busy places. Fast human transportation is concentrated within these strips of pavement that cut through what can often be a human-designed landscape, be it housing or farmland or something else. But between the road and the other development, there tends to be a section largely neglected by deliberate human interference and left to its own devices. The roadside. It is here where roadside attractions await.
I was admiring a sprawling stretch of sunflowers growing wildly along a road on one summer day. There was no traffic, so I got out of the car to take a closer look. Bees and butterflies flew about the flowers waving in the breeze. Crickets and grasshoppers leapt through grass. My eyes traveled down the long, long stems of the sunflowers to the ground, where brown leaves sat in shallow water in the ditch. A neon green tail slithered away in the water. I still do not know who that was.
On an overcast winter morning, the farm fields looked cold and gray. Lining the edge of the road up ahead were small movements, which originated from a small flock of horned larks hopping around on the pavement and in the ditch, pecking at the ground. As I slowly approached, they collectively flew into the field where their beigey plumage and small size rendered them almost indiscernible, their location being apparent only when they moved.
We do prize the destination over the journey literally and figuratively, but in doing so we deprive ourselves of the awareness of the incredible and the bizarre that we pass. Let us take advantage of pit stops and follow the bumblebee to her secluded home in a clump of tall grass in the ditch and admire the spontaneous patch of purple milkweed blooming in all its splendor.
The roadside itself is, indeed, a destination. Homes are made there. Food is gathered there. Travelers pass through there. All of this activity takes place right under our noses, with or without our noticing. A spider has spun its web in the tree in hopes of catching the moth that the bat missed last night only for the web to be disturbed by a raccoon that was scolded by a nesting robin whose blue eggs sit snugly in the tree right alongside the road.