We shouldn’t, but we take some roads for granted. Those stretches of lane combinations running to and from the places to which such roads take us. But a road can be a way: your way, my way, another’s way. It can guide a forward looking vision or be a way determined by a memory.

Some old roads can combine these itineraries. Take, for example, the River Road — the one we now call Long Rapids Road.

It started as a path along the river. But after they began cutting the big timber in Long Rapids they discovered the soil there was fertile so farmers came to join the lumbermen.

In 1889 they built a hotel there. In time it acquired a bar, a pool hall, then they started holding dances. Young men and women began traveling paths their mother’s had not set for them, paths bearing their dreams and intersecting with roads leading to Alpena and beyond. One of those roads was the River Road.

The main road north from Alpena ran west to Lachine then north through Long Rapids to Posen and Rogers City, west through Onaway to Afton, north to Cheboygan — only then to run along the Lakeshore to Mackinac. It was rough going. Road conditions from the south were also poor. It required 14½ hours in a Maxwell Runabout to make the trip to Alpena from Bay City.

Then, down the road came “Good Roads Earl,” a bicyclist who deplored poor cycling surfaces. Earl was on a mission, a mission to defeat “the mighty monarch Mud.” He became our state’s first highway commissioner.

In 1913 “Good Roads Earl” came to Alpena to support “Bee Day.” It was a day set aside for Northeast Michigan citizens to work together to improve the road that united them.

On June 9, 1913, positioned all along the Bay City to Mackinaw route, 10,000 men with 5,000 teams of horses moved and spread nearly 150,000 cubic yards of sand, soil, and gravel. It took 2,000 women to prepare and serve the food needed to sustain them.

Emmet Richards, editor of the Alpena News, filed a report with Colliers, a national news magazine of the time. His dispatch appeared in the July 19, 1913, edition. Here are portions of what he had to say:

“To appreciate the full significance of Bee Day, one had to make the journey to the wilds of Presque Isle County which is thickly settled with Polish people. These people turned out en masse on Bee Day.”

“The Poles sang old country songs as they worked cheered by frequent drafts from a wagon loaded with kegs of beer to which picnic pumps were frequently applied.”

John Emmet Richards

Today, they say, we have arrived at the advent of the self-guided conveyance — vehicles capable of shepherding our way forward over roads with lanes. But we’ve been down this road before.

My great uncle Clint was a Long Rapids farmer. He would come to town as needed. After his business was complete he’d stop to have his beer pail — his “growler” — filled. Then he would start for home with horse, wagon, and growler, moving gently along the River Road.

Somewhere along his way, Clint would take a final sip. His head would nod, his shoulders droop, the horse’s reins would drop from his hands. Thus freed from its slumbering master’s guidance, in no need of extraterrestrial direction, Clint’s horse would take him home.

Clint’s way forward, no longer a vision, had become his horse’s memory.

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My thanks to Marlo Broad and Bob Lyngos, reference librarians at The Alpena County, George N. Fletcher Public Library for their assistance with this and other columns and to Ruth Ann Cochrane for her book on early Long Rapids.

Doug Pugh’s Vignettes run bi-weekly on Tuesdays. He can be reached via email at pughda@gmail.com.