Country Roads and Memory Lane

I always look forward to the Perseid meteor shower, which peaks each year in mid August. This year’s shower peaked sometime after midnight on August 13—a dark one, since the moon was just two days past new. Since the list of things worth getting out of bed for in the middle of the night is short at the best of times, a celestial event with the capacity to send fifty meteors an hour streaking across the sky seems worth missing some sleep to see. And if you must be awake and out of doors during August at all, the best time is probably two in the morning, when the one-two punch of heat and humidity softens enough to make the velvety, fragrant open air of a Louisiana nighttime almost luxurious. When the kids were younger, being woken up after midnight to go lie in the dark was a big enough adventure that they would emerge groggily to join me in the grass. If the sky was clear we’d lie with our feet facing southeast and count shooting stars until enough wishes had been made or one of them started to snore. Nowadays I find that teenagers are harder to wake—let alone to impress—than seven-year-olds. So usually it’s just me. 

Now each August, the trick is remembering that the Perseids are coming at all. This year I might have forgotten altogether had I not been reading Julia Reed’s 2007 book The House on First Street, a beguiling memoir about the writer’s lifelong love affair with New Orleans. Reed’s an entertaining storyteller, and her book chronicles the sort of flamboyant, booze-soaked adventures most of us wish we had spent our twenties and thirties having. Her story culminates with an account of the nightmarish house renovation that she and her husband undertook on their home in the Lower Garden District—a years-long undertaking that the couple finished (sort of) about a week before Katrina struck. In the weeks and months after the storm, in an all but deserted city, Reed describes the startling sight of a starlit sky normally obscured by light pollution. “When I look up at night, on the nights when there isn’t a moon, there’s a river of stars,” she writes. Even if there is much that we cannot see or do very well because we live at the end of a country road twenty miles from anywhere, one thing we can do well is stars. For meteor shower viewing, our backyard is hard to beat. 

Thirty-five years ago my mother-in-law, Dorcas, founded Country Roads in the dining room of the house at the end of that country road, because she thought she could see plenty of things worth sharing from this vantage point. She thought she was creating a tourism magazine that would inspire visitors coming to the 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair to save time for the constellation of little towns along the Great River Road. But while nary a World’s Fair-bound tourist stopped for gas in St. Francisville, the locals appreciated the presence of a publication that celebrated and unsung cultural treasures in their part of the world. If the folks in Clinton were having a peach festival, the people in New Roads wanted to know about it. If in Natchez City Cemetery there was a statue of an angel that seemed to follow you with its eyes, people in St. Francisville were proud to know that, too. Because knowing about the quirky, historic, magnificent, delicious, and frankly oddball attractions that made their surroundings unique confirmed what they already suspected: they had the privilege of living in an interesting part of the world. The World’s Fair came and went, the tourists went home, and Country Roads kept on keeping on. It was authentic; home-grown, and did what it said it would do, which was to supply a seemingly inexhaustible supply of adventures close to home. 

So if you’ve ever wondered why Dorcas named her magazine Country Roads, now you know. I hope you enjoy this thirty-fifth anniversary issue (the 269th, if my math is correct, for which I have written a Reflections column). Constructing this retrospective has been a challenge because of the overwhelming volume of material; a joy because of the opportunity to rediscover forgotten things; and a reminder that, if you look carefully enough, there’s a river of stars out there to see. And that sometimes, the best place to see them is from a country road.

Look closer. Discover more.

—James Fox-Smith, publisher

james@countryroadsmag.com