The Road to Happiness was Paved with Tar

When I was a kid, there were only two types of roads: tar and gravel.

Any road that was paved was a tar road, even if it was concrete. At least that’s the way we looked at it. And if we needed to be more specific, any paved road in town was a street. Names like avenue, boulevard, drive, lane, circle and trail were ignored because we didn’t know what any of them were supposed to look like. They all looked like streets to us. Central Avenue was just Central. Hallstrom Drive was just Hallstrom.

All of this was important because we all rode our bikes everywhere. We rode on streets, sidewalks, driveways, yards and rural roads. We even rode up Memorial Park Drive (as best we could), then sometimes back down through the woods on the cowpath. We rode through water and snow and on ice. We delivered newspapers, rode to church, ran errands for our mothers.

We did not ride on highways, which were any roads with a speed limit of more than 30. The folks didn’t allow it and it was even too scary for us.

Streets were roads paved with tar, plain and simple. Later we heard it was called asphalt, which contains bitumen. This made it a bituminous road. It was also called blacktop. We stayed with tar.

The Roads Less Traveled

I think the reason we referred to a concrete road as tar was because before concrete roads were replaced, their cracks got filled with so much tar, they basically became tar roads. Concrete roads were expensive so not replaced often. They were usually highways where heavy trucks traveled. We avoided them.

But there were some city streets that were concrete. Central Avenue used to be concrete. It had deteriorated to such a state of disrepair that you could hear every loose bolt on every car that drove on it. A service tech at an old car dealer once told me that when customers complained of rattles, they drove the cars up Central to help locate where they were coming from. After repairs, they did it again to see if they fixed them.

Indeed, many failing concrete roads were simply overlayed with tar until the road got too high. It was surprising to see concrete underneath tar as a road was completely replaced.

“Hey, did ya see that they’re tarring down at Colvill School?” That meant a bike to inspect it. And to breathe in the fresh asphalt smell. Maybe it was the bitumen. If you’ve lived in Red Wing for as long as I have, you’ve seen every street repaved, maybe multiple times.

We rode through puddles in construction zones when rain delayed progress. We rode on hot tar just after steamrolling. The heat from the hot tar rose all around us as our dirty tires left tracks. We couldn’t imagine how those workers could endure that all day, especially when it was a humid 90-degree day. It seemed unfair that we could just ride our bikes to Colvill Park and stay cool in the pool.

Staying Close to Home

We didn’t ride out of town because rural roads were mostly gravel, often loose, dusty gravel. There were no shoulders and it was a long walk home if you had a flat tire. Burnside was even too far and it was hard to avoid the highway. Bike trails didn’t exist back then. But there wasn’t any reason for us to ride out there.

Our bikes were mostly used bikes or hand-me-downs that broke down often. We didn’t use locks on them, no matter where we parked them. We also proudly displayed our City of Red Wing bicycle licenses swinging on the rear of the seats, fully certain that if any of our bikes were stolen, the license number would identify it.

We kept things simpler back then. If a road was tar, that’s all we needed to know.