"If directions to your house include ‘Turn off the paved road,’ you might be a redneck." –Jeff Foxworthy.

rowing up in rural Maine, I always took subtle pleasure in giving directions to city folk – who we lovingly referred to as flatlanders. It was priceless watching their eyes glaze over when you told them to "turn right at the fire station, then drive about two miles and turn left at the old brown house with the satellite dish out front hooking an immediate left just before the giant weeping willow." Amazingly, some flatlanders actually tried to commit it all to memory. I guess they didn’t want us to know they weren’t from heah.

Directions in rural towns really do have their own vernacular. The streets have names and numbers but with the exception of notables like "Main" and "School", nobody ever really vocalizes them. Officially, Route 202 was the main drag running through town – but I only know that because the map says so. Depending on where you were and what direction you were heading, that road could either be Main Street, the Bangor Road or the Albion Road. For directions over ten miles we wouldn’t even mention the unofficial name of the road. We’d simply start out by saying, "Drive as if you’re heading towards Bangor."

I lived on a dirt road that emptied onto only two other roads – one at each end. Yet, I knew at least five ways to get to and from school. And only one of them involved main roads. No one way was really any quicker than the other by more than a minute or two, though back roads were shorter distance-wise – the hypotenuse if you will. The main road was straighter and had a higher speed limit, but you were pretty much guaranteed not to run into cops on the back roads. Provided you knew where the bumps, hair-pin turns and missing (or stolen) Stop signs were, you could fly along doing seventy.

People make fun, but sometimes in Maine, you really "cahn’t get theah from heah." Not that there isn’t a road that goes theah. It’s simply that towns and counties like where I grew up aren’t laid out in grids. You have to work at it to get certain places. You must be prepared to navigate nameless roads with questionable landmarks. (A "garage" to one person can look an awful lot like a "barn" to the next person.) We were usually nice enough to outsiders. If we were giving directions to a local person, it would involve all back roads with at least a dozen turns in the span of five minutes. For somebody not familiar to the area, we’d do our best to keep them on the main roads, even if it meant taking them an extra mile out of the way. But it was unavoidable. Eventually, they did have to leave the highway and venture forth onto marginally paved roads that may or may not have even had center lines.

Driving in the sticks is something learned through upbringing. Most kids by the time they get their licenses could direct Louis and Clark through their county. It’s an acquired instinct that you can only appreciate if you’ve grown up around it. When you can’t simply direct somebody by saying, "Corner of 27^th and Broadway," you learn to have an eye for not just the streets, but for the whole area where you live.