I’ve had many amazing experiences living in the countryside for the past 5 years since my family moved from our home on the St. Olaf side of Northfield, Minnesota to right outside the small rural town of Dennison. Dennison is a town of around only 300 people located 10 minutes to the east of Northfield. While I have come to bask in much of the enjoyment of rural life, the quietness, the beauty of the roaming hills of the valley that I live in, and the friendly farmer neighbors I have, my favorite enjoyment is being able to drive around every country road after night has fallen. I’ll get into my car, leave town from either my place of employment or a friends house, and on the most beautiful of summer nights decide that I should enjoy it for a bit, even if it makes my parents stay up an extra 15-20 minutes to make sure that I get home ok.
The first thing that comes to mind in my enjoyment of night driving is the fact that you're almost the only one on the road, allowing you the ability to slow down and bask in the lights of downtown, the noise of the wind howling, the rain drops pitter-pattering on your windshield, and on the corn and bean fields that mark the sides of the country roads for miles. The cool, fresh air of summer nights keep you going as you tour the small towns and neighborhoods, such as Kenyon and Randolph. Towns so small that you can blink only once and you will have missed it all, and towns that at night are so majestically quiet that you could hear a pin drop.
The peacefulness of the country roads allows you to have the freedom of thought without distractions. It has allowed me to think about personal life stuff like how work went and starting to plan out the next day already. I speed along while the announcer on the BBC news show on NPR softly tells the day's headlines and the major events that will be occurring the next day and in the coming week. Sometimes I’ll make a pit stop at one of the gas stations on the edge of Northfield or in one of these small towns. I either have forgotten to eat dinner before I went to a friends house or pack one for my break at work, while other times it's based off a chance glance at my gas gage where I come to the judgement that I won’t be able to make it home without filling up.
As I step outside my car, I bask in finally being able to breathe the fresh outside air and not the less fresh one of the inside of the car, and be able to hear the corn rustle in the wind, and the cows letting out their last moo before they fall asleep. These peacefully calming aspects of the countryside are perfect to let my mind let me think, as well as forget about the problems I have on my mind from that day. If work went bad, a friend and I argued a lot, a customer got on my nerves, relationship concerns, or anything else, the country drive would help me forget and clear my thoughts. The joy that this brings leads me to realize just the reason that John Denver wrote and sang a song so long ago about country roads.
I pull into my driveway, press the button to open the door of my garage, and pull into the garage to stop my car there for its final resting place until the following morning. As soon as the garage door fully closes, I stand there in the middle of my driveway to listen a bit, so I can enjoy the sounds of the nature of rural Minnesota just one more time before walking upstairs to bed. I begin to anticipate driving around and enjoying the sounds of nighttime in the country the next day.
