Where the sidewalk ends

With the price of gasoline so horrifically high these days and the burning holes in my pockets so notoriously absent, I have instituted a moratorium on frivolous gasoline burning, with car trips now being relegated to the strictly necessary. Thus my regular grocery run has been put off for more than a week as I've managed to make do with supplies from the pantry. There are two things we are constantly running out of, however, and that's bread and milk. I packed the last two slices of bread in Michael's lunch today and drank the last drop of milk this morning, leaving us potentially stranded, nutritionally speaking, for the weekend. Rather than break down and heigh-ho the car keys for anything less than an emergency would not be showing the proper Spartan spirit. So I decided that the friendly neighbourhood Kroger can't be more than a mile away, and hauled out the stroller. Jane and I set off on foot (and wheel).

It was a balmy sunny morning and the walk promised well. We headed merrily off toward the bend in the road and had gotten far enough away from home as to render any notion of turning back unthinkable when we ran up against a vintage Shel Silverstein situation. I mean to say that the sidewalk really ended, suddenly and abruptly, without any warning and no alternatives but the rugged grass or the side of the road. The street's not a highway by any means, but the speed limit must be all of 45, and the way cars - and even the occasional truck - whiz on past convinced me that this was no place for peds. There was virtually no shoulder, with maybe a foot of street between white stripe and gravel that fell off steeply toward the ditch, which certainly was not welcoming to strollers. I tried walking very quickly on the edge of the road, but the way oncoming traffic veered madly into the opposing lane convinced me that I was being a dashed nuisance to them. I eventually crossed the ditch and finished my journey to the store by cutting across front lawns (whose rough and rugged mountainous terrain should not be dignified by the term lawn), very likely trespassing but at least maintaining a steady distance of at least twenty feet from the road.

Shopping concluded, I embarked upon the return journey, only to notice that a gallon of milk and various other comestibles weighting down the storage space underneath the stroller (which was, quite literally, a strolling stroller, not a jogging or cross-country stroller) rendered the notion of traversing rough terrain laughable. Accordingly I laughed, but that did not address the issue at hand, so off we set on a spine-tingling sprint for home base. We started on the opposing side of the road, of course, looked both ways, and at the next lull in traffic hightailed it along the narrow strip of safety to the harbour of the next driveway, where we pulled off and paused, gasping for breath while cars whizzed past at dangerous speeds. And so it continued. Every time there was a momentary lull in traffic, we made a mad dash for the next driveway up, which in some cases were farther apart than you would expect from such a rapidly-developing area. At one point the next driveway seemed to recede like the fabled oasis in the desert while a huge truck loomed up over the brow of the next hill, and I felt exactly like the kid in the lame movie scene when the locomotive is steaming full tilt toward him as he runs in peril of his life to get off the railroad bridge in time. At last we got back to the place where the sidewalk inexplicably started up again, and it was all safe and happy from there.

That's our exercise for the day. Shall I be making the trip again? I think if I were a carefree young college student or something, short on money but high on dash and recklessness, I wouldn't even think twice before doing it again. But considering I have a baby to look out for--well, to quote Dr. Seuss,

By the light of the moon, by the light of a star
They walked all night, from near to far.
I would never walk. I would take a car.