This We Like, 30

Because following them has led me to the most incredible finds. The width of a roadside, the age of the trees around it, the plants growing along it, the rock layers within it, are a Rosetta Stone, unlocking the story of a place. Neatly mown grass roadsides, something Aldo Leopold lamented even in the 1940s, are an abomination. People that anal won’t let anything wild remain. But a nice shaggy ditch? It means interesting folks are around. I’ll cruise it, looking for flashes of blue or yellow from blooming native plants. True, most roadside vegetation is of the noxious-weed variety, but tracking the rare wild survivors, following tufts of Indian grass like bread crumbs along back roads, has led me to some of my favorite places—a forgotten drainage canal full of threatened species, a private trout stream hidden in the alders, a goat prairie never touched by a plow. Last summer, a burst of purple on a neglected shoulder led me to a strip of rare plants, including a mass of endangered gentians just a few feet from the road. When I rolled by a few months later, they were gone, the mower’s tracks still cutting through the gravel.