Home by Another Way by Robert Benson Read Free Book Online Page B

the breeze returns to gentle.

    On our first visit, the first time we went riding around, we were just taking in the sights. Actually Sara wastaking in the sights; I was learning to drive again, or so it seemed. Driving on the wrong side of the road while sitting on the wrong side of the car brings a whole new meaning to the term “driving defensively.” And driving defensively is something you learn to take to heart on St. Cecilia.
    Thanks to the English, you are driving in the left-hand lane and not the right-hand lane. So you have to be sure that your instincts as to which way to look and which way to turn do not suddenly kick in and put you in jeopardy. Every time we stop for gasoline, just before we pull back onto the road, the attendant will call out, “Stay to the left. Stay to the left.”
    You also have to keep your eye out for a car that has randomly stopped in the middle of the road while the driver carries on a conversation with someone sitting on the porch of the house across the street. There are no shoulders to the road; the drivers just stop in the middle. I finally learned that you do not have to wait for the conversation to wind down—you just honk cheerfully and go around them, no matter how muchtraffic is coming the other way—but it can still be a little disconcerting and very hard on your sightseeing. You can pretty easily ooh and aah your way right into the oncoming traffic or a ditch if you are not careful.
    Besides cars, there are two other kinds of traffic that require constant vigilance. The first is made up of the buses and the taxis. Both of them look like passenger vans—a yellow license plate means that what is about to hit you is a taxi; a green plate indicates it is a bus. Both taxis and buses have brightly colored paint jobs for the most part, and they have names painted on them, like
Destiny’s Child
and
Killer Bee
and
Go Down Moses
. They race up and down the main road and the back roads with the reckless abandon of a seventeen-year-old who has just gotten his license and has been sent to run an errand in his father’s car. Which seems a little out of place for a crowd of folks who are functioning on island time, though I guess you have to make up time somewhere.
    The other traffic to keep your eyes open for is the herds of goats and sheep that wander the island. I readsomewhere that there are 2.5 ruminants for each St. Cecilian—
ruminants
being a fancy word for a class of animal that includes sheep and goats. I did not meet the people who did the census, but I am assuming that they know.
    People tag their sheep and goats and put bells on them and then turn them loose to wander the island. Who knows how they find them again. Perhaps there is such a thing as a homing goat. Perhaps they do the same thing that we do, just start out along the main road and keep going until the circle of the road brings them home again. We did meet one old St. Cecilian who claims that he gets his goats to come home at night by giving them treats, but he may have been pulling my leg.
    The goats and sheep work their way up and down the island, grazing along the roadways, chasing their young ones out of the traffic, and occasionally stopping to nap in the sun or have a group meeting in the lane in which you are driving. I am thinking of recommending that our neighborhood association explore usinggoats and sheep as traffic-calming devices in our neighborhood back in Tennessee. It works well enough on St. Cecilia that there is not even a single stoplight.

    According to the official rules of riding around, one does not stay on the main roads. Riding the blue highways is what you do when you really want to explore a stretch of countryside, whether you are in the plains of the Delta or the hills of Tennessee. So by our second or third trip to St. Cecilia—armed with maps and history books and other information—we were riding up and down every little lane and track that led off the main road and back into