Your True Tales
March 2008 - Page 6

Mysterious Looped Road
by DirtRoadEnthusiast

In high school (I graduated in 2002), my best friend and I enjoyed driving around the country roads of Missouri at night, exploring the veritable wilderness and always trying to find roads we'd never been down before. The seasoned Missouri traveler will know that there are several species of gravel road. There is the road, the drive, the lane, and the loop, and the designation isn't cosmetic. For instance, a loop is a gravel road that connects to another road on both ends, as in a loop. A drive is like a very long dead end street, etc.

One night, my friend I were driving down a dirt road that teed off with another, and there across the road was the biggest tree I have personally ever seen in Missouri. We turned left and after a while came to a paved road, and turned right. We didn't put much stock in paved roads, and the next gravel road we came to, we turned down, which was on right, or back the way we'd come basically. After a while, we saw the big tree again and the road that teed with the one we were on and realized that we were on a loop. So we ended up back on the paved road again, and in some frustration, decided to turn around and go back to the road that teed with the loop, because back that way we'd seen some other gravel roads we might explore.

Only we never found the road, or the tree, but instead ended up back on the other end of the loop. By this time we were going batty, turned around once again, and viola! there was the tree and the road. Bemused, we returned to this loop in the daytime, and discovered that if you went down it one way, you could fine the tree and the road, but not if you went down it the other way. We even took other friends there from time to time to show off our latest discovery. No one could ever figure it out.

This was the same road that my friend and I got out of the car one night and snuck down into a little creek bottom. There were these little green lights everywhere. We were terrified until we managed to catch one and found that it was some kind of little beetle with lights along its sides that lived in the water. It looked like a miniature trilobite. We took one home in a film canister, but never managed to identify it with any book or website.

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