The Road Is Better When You Don’t Know Exactly Where You’re Going

On secondary roads, unexpected encounters, and leaving enough uncertainty in a journey for something to happen.

By Christopher Spencer

Somewhere west of Macon, Georgia, on a two-lane road whose number I no longer remember, I came across a group of men plowing a field behind a team of horses. It was early spring, sometime in the early 2000s, and the freshly turned Georgia earth was almost impossibly red in the clear morning light. I had been traveling through the coastal towns of the Carolinas down to Savannah and was making my way back toward Texas. I wasn’t lost. I knew generally where I was going. I wasn’t in a rush or time crunch, so I skipped the interstate and headed toward the backcountry on rural farm roads.

That decision had already made the trip home more interesting. Secondary roads passed through the parts of a state that interstate highways seemed designed to avoid: farm fields, courthouse squares, old service stations, small towns that had not yet been reduced to an exit number. On the interstate, one state increasingly looks like the next. There are the same gas stations, the same fast-food signs, the same enormous parking lots and the same promise that everything you might need could be obtained without ever really encountering the place you were passing through. On the smaller roads, Georgia still looked unmistakably like Georgia.

The men in the field caught my attention because of the horses. Even then, seeing a team pulling a plow through a working field felt like something from another time. I pulled off onto the grassy shoulder and stopped to watch. The car itself probably made the scene stranger than I realized. I was driving an enormous white Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham, a genuine land yacht of a bygone era, and it was not exactly the sort of vehicle that regularly appeared beside a farm field in that part of rural Georgia.

After a few passes down the field, the men noticed me. Instead of wondering why some stranger was staring at them from the roadside, they called out and invited me over. They were brothers, farmers from a family that had worked the land there for generations. They weren’t reenacting the past for tourists, and they weren’t using horses because they had somehow been left behind by modern agriculture. They owned a tractor. They simply still used horses and a plow for some of the work because it was part of how they farmed.

We began talking. They were curious about the man in the white Cadillac, and I was curious about them. At some point I mentioned that I had grown up on a cattle ranch, which shifted the conversation in the way a small piece of shared experience sometimes can. The details of our lives were different, but the language of land, animals, weather and family was familiar. One of the brothers eventually produced a bottle of moonshine they had made in their own still. He offered me a swig, and the bottle began making its way around.

For perhaps half an hour we stood at the edge of that field passing the bottle and talking. They told me about farming the same land as generations before them. I told them something about where I had come from and where I was going. There was no particular reason for the conversation to matter. None of us exchanged addresses. There was no photograph to post, no restaurant to recommend, no attraction to rate and no useful piece of information to carry away. Eventually I got back into the Cadillac and continued west.

I couldn’t find that field again if I tried.

That may be part of why I remember it so clearly.

Travel has become remarkably good at removing uncertainty. A phone can now tell us precisely where we are, exactly how long it will take to get somewhere else and which turn to make six miles before we reach it. Before arriving in a town we can know which restaurant has the highest rating, what everyone orders there, what the dining room looks like and whether the table beside the window is worth requesting. We can inspect a hotel room before booking it, walk virtually down the street outside it and read hundreds of opinions from people who slept there before us. If a road is slow, an algorithm quietly sends us around it.

Most of this is wonderful. I have no desire to return to the days of unfolding an enormous road map across the steering wheel or discovering after dark that the motel recommended by a faded roadside sign was considerably less charming than advertised. Getting genuinely lost could be frustrating. Sometimes it could be dangerous. A bad meal did not become a good story merely because there was no internet available to warn you about it. Modern navigation has made travel easier, safer and, in countless practical ways, better.

But convenience solved a problem, and then we began applying the solution to moments that were never really problems at all.

Somewhere along the way, travel became something to optimize. We search for the best route, the best hotel, the best restaurant, the ten things we must see and the three things everyone says we can skip. We build itineraries before we arrive and consult reviews while standing on the sidewalk. The ability to know almost everything in advance has gradually created the expectation that we should. An unexpected delay becomes inefficiency. A wrong turn becomes wasted time. An unremarkable meal becomes a failure of research.

The result can be a peculiar kind of travel in which we go very far without encountering very much that we did not already expect to find.

I understand the temptation. Time away is expensive. Vacation days are limited. If you have crossed an ocean or driven a thousand miles, there is a reasonable desire not to waste the opportunity. There are places worth planning for and things worth reserving months ahead. Serendipity is a poor strategy for getting a table at a restaurant with twelve seats or reaching a ferry that leaves once a day. The point is not to replace planning with incompetence.

It is simply to leave something unplanned.

That might mean taking the secondary road when the interstate would save forty minutes. It might mean choosing lunch because a place smells good when you walk past it instead of because four thousand strangers gave it 4.7 stars. It might mean asking the bartender what is worth seeing tomorrow and actually going where he suggests. Sometimes it means allowing a town that was supposed to be an overnight stop to keep you for another day.

The best discoveries rarely announce themselves as discoveries while they are happening. They often look like inconveniences, distractions or small changes of plan. A road bends somewhere you did not expect. A shop is open when it should have been closed. Someone tells you to turn left at the church and keep going until the pavement ends. You stop because something catches your eye.

Or you see three men and a team of horses turning red Georgia dirt beneath an early spring sun.

Had I been traveling that road today, I wonder whether I would have stopped. Perhaps I would. I would like to think so. But I also know how easily a screen creates urgency where none exists. The navigation display says there are still five hours and seventeen minutes to the destination. The hotel confirmation is waiting. The restaurant closes at nine. The route has been calculated, and every unscheduled stop appears, however subtly, as a deviation from the plan.

There was no such pressure on that Georgia road. I was headed toward Texas, and Texas was a very large target. Somewhere west was good enough.

That freedom was not unique to the era before smartphones. We sometimes romanticize the past simply because we survived it, forgetting the inconveniences and frustrations that accompanied it. What has changed is not our capacity for wandering. It is our ability to eliminate wandering almost entirely if we choose. Technology did not take serendipity away from us. It merely made serendipity optional.

Which means the responsibility is now ours.

There are still secondary roads. There are still cafés without a thousand reviews, towns that never appear on anyone’s list and people whose lives are more interesting than whatever attraction we were hurrying toward. The world did not become less surprising when we put a map in our pockets. We simply became much better at avoiding surprises.

I don’t remember the names of the brothers in Georgia. I don’t know what became of their farm, whether the horses are still there or whether another generation of that family is turning the same red soil. I don’t remember the road number, and I couldn’t place the field on a map. What remains is the bright light, the horses moving down the rows, the absurd white Cadillac sitting beside the road, and a bottle being passed among men who had been strangers thirty minutes earlier.

There is no pin for that memory.

And perhaps that is the point. The road is sometimes better when you know where you are going, but not exactly what you are going to find along the way.