When the nearest phone was nine miles away

I came this close -- this close! -- this week to yelling at the driver in the car in front of me at the wait-and-sometimes-go intersection of Broadway and Kingshighway.

The driver -- could have been a man, could have been a woman -- was clearly in a snit because of a cellphone. The device either wasn't showing any bars or wasn't responding quickly enough to jabs on the keyboard. More than once the driver threatened to throw the phone into the street.

"I hope a (expletive) dump truck runs over you and smashes your (expletive expletive expletive) to smithereens!"

As a result of all this, our go-ahead green light came on, but the driver was so busy punishing a small battery-operated device that we missed our chance to turn. When we finally got onto Kingshighway, the car wove from lane to lane as the driver continued to let the phone know what's what.

What I wanted to yell at the driver was this: Hey, once upon a time we had to drive nine miles to the nearest phone. No batteries required.

(By the way, remember when you only needed batteries for a flashlight? Then someone made a gazillion dollars producing mechanized toys that went through batteries like teens inhale pizza. Then along came battery-operated TV remotes, and then the world changed. And also by the way, do you know the worst thing any hospital employee can say when you're being treated in the ER? "Uh-oh, looks like the batteries are dead." That certainly bolsters my confidence in the miraculous curative powers of modern medicine.)

Really, nine miles to the nearest phone. My folks got a phone in the farmhouse on Killough Valley in the Ozarks over yonder after I left for college.

Phones in those days were mostly for business or emergencies, particularly if you were on a party line like we were. I remember once while in college I was getting ready to come home for a holiday and the Greyhound bus schedule was changed at the last minute and I needed to let my folks, who were driving all the way to St. Louis to pick me up, know about the change so they didn't go to all that trouble for nothing.

So, I called our good family friend Clara in town and asked her if she could get a message to my folks before they left for the long drive to St. Louis. "You know they have a phone now," she said. Yes, I replied. "So why did you call me?" Because I don't know their number, I said. Clara thought about that for a minute. Then she said, "You have a safe trip home. Hear? I'll get word to your folks." That's the kind of friend Clara was. She raised a bunch of children to be just as nice as she was. I could call any of them right this minute, and ask a favor like that and they wouldn't bat an eye. One small problem: I don't know their phone numbers.

When we went to town to use the phone -- death in the family, major illness, tornado -- important stuff -- we did not walk nine miles. We drove the family truck. But many shorter trips relied on strong legs and limber feet.

If you wanted to get a message to a neighbor -- the nearest one was a mile up Killough Valley -- you walked to the neighbor's house. You rarely had to knock on the front door. Between hound dogs and a swarm of children, your arrival would be announced well in advance.

Or if you wanted to get the mail the same day it was delivered to the battered mailbox on a sturdy post where the gravel farm road met the blacktop highway, you walked -- uphill, of course, but not both ways, thank God. It was a mile from our house to the highway.

There were no buses for students who attended Shady Nook School on Greenwood Valley. So we walked. It was two and a half miles from our house to the schoolhouse, and it was uphill both ways, even if it didn't snow every day.

If we wanted to go swimming in the river, we walked over the hill about two miles, following old logging roads that had long been abandoned.

When the rural school districts were consolidated, school buses started going down all those gravel roads into all those valleys. We wondered how life could get any easier than that. Imagine walking out the gate of your front yard and stepping onto a big yellow bus that would take you all the way to school.

Snatches of all this swirled through my head as I waited for the light to change at Broadway and Kingshighway, which, by the way, is two miles from my house. I could walk.

I'll do it if the driver of that car will join me. Just one rule: No phones.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.