The Driveway Diaries: A Dirt Road Almanac

by Tim Brookes

Book Overview

Part autobiography, part a humourous study of Americana, these essays from Tim Brookes, who moved from England to New England, came about as an accident. While working on a doomed book about... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885586337
• ISBN13: 9781885586339
• Release Date: May 2005
• Publisher: Turtle Point Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Road Less Traveled

Tim Brookes, a Brit who discovered American atop a bicycle, settled in Burlington, Vermont with a plumb teaching job at the state university and never left. Now director of the writing program at Champlain College, Brookes has compiled a number of winsome essays about moving with his family thirty-five miles out into the country, to grow intellectually among the pure forces of nature then ultimately rue "the balance of power between order and chaos," as Brookes now ruefully philosophizes. The Driveway Diaries: a Dirt Road Almanac emerged from a regular column Brookes wrote for a local newspaper, and many of his musings about exurbia have been broadcast on National Public Radio's Sunday Weekend Edition, and most recently excerpted in Harper's Magazine. The book chronicles the first seven years of living just beyond the suavities taken for granted in a city, and as the realities of unassisted living supplant the expectations of harmonious enlightenment, Brookes staves off organic dementia by writing eloquently in sixty-three essays about unimproved existence. The Driveway Diaries is a good pocket guide for anyone who leaves the pavement for greening pastures, and is especially informative of what is waiting for the ecstatic, rejuvenated immigrants fleeing to La Plata County for a modicum of emotional or financial independence. Open space is lovely, and there are certainly moments of bliss living on the land, but it comes at a cost for which most urbanites haven't budgeted and can ill afford. At first, for Brookes, just finding the quaint old house perched on a hillside overlooking a wooded Vermont valley was paradisical. "Ten acres. In England, where I spent the first half of my live, you can't have ten acres unless you are an Earl, or are sleeping with an Earl, or the outcome of someone else sleeping with an Earl, Brookes says as he begins his journey. "I barely looked at the house. I looked at the land and saw everything my mother had ever planted in a garden, plus everything that she had always wanted to plant in a garden, but had never had garden enough." Thus starts the infatuation that would creep slowly like a rhizome to envelop Brookes and his young family in a form of intuitive self defense. Precursors to catastrophe begin right away for Brookes and, likewise, for everyone moving to Bayfield or Breen, if they only saw yesterday what they see today. Drought was the first harbinger Brookes saw after closing the deal on his dream life. In Burlington, a city of thirty-eight thousand, rumor had it that Vermont was becoming a drought state, and as Brookes was readying his move from a rented house in town he noticed that the lawn was turning brown and shriveling up, but . . . "Outside Burlington, it quickly became apparent that drought, like serious snow, begins outside the city limits," Brookes observed solemnly. "On closer inspection, all the interesting (if nameless) little bushes and shrubs skirting the house are now s