Walk A Crooked Mile #09039

The Story

You can indeed walk a crooked mile on this old way-back farmland road in south-central Pennsylvania. It has a very meandering dipsy-doodle yellow line snaking into the distance following all the dips and turns. This back road is obviously very uneven. It’s my guess this is the original farm road from long ago that was widened and paved without the benefit of much modern machine grading, if any. It doesn’t take much to imagine this view as a dirt road.

This back road was lucky even to see pavement, not to mention a yellow line, I would think.

Driving down this crooked mile, I saw this view in the rearview mirror of the truck. I immediately stopped right in the middle of my lane to step out and have a good gander at it…looked good to me. The very bent-up back road with the curvy double yellow line contrasted with the dead-straight line of power poles enough to make something unusual.

So I reached in to grab the camera off the seat and started shooting while standing in the road. No great shakes there, I hadn’t seen another vehicle in quite a while and this was the Pennsylvania way back after all. I continued shooting at different angles for fifteen minutes while the truck sat in the road with the door open and no one ever came along. I was even laying on the road for low-perspective shots, too. Back road asphalt is as hard as you’d expect, but this was a very unusual and shooter-friendly location!

This picture was shot digitally in color, then converted to black and white to do a little hand tinting. I put some of the colors back into the image at a reduced opacity in just a few places. People have been hand tinting images since the 1880s with ink and paint, but this was done the modern digital way to make that drunken yellow line stand out to have a crooked mile appear even more crooked.

Location: the countryside near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, in Franklin County. Picture and story © Andrew Dierks