"There's an old saying I heard down the line from longtime Wabash Professor Vic Powell: 'Bal-Hinch is just a mile down the road, and you never get there.'"
The skitter of gravel sent sideways by my narrow bicycle tires stirred the murmuring calm of an otherwise sleepy September evening. Stopping between a wall of dried field corn and a clump of rusty yellow pawpaw trees, I leaned my bike against a fence post to gather my bearings. The sun was slinking away and a horde of mosquitoes was harassing me. I needed
to find my way home.
Hours earlier I had opted to spend a casual afternoon cruising the countryside in search of Bal-Hinch, an unincorporated two square-mile tract of land somewhere in the southwest corner of Montgomery County, IN. But just a few miles in, I peeled my tires off one last stretch of sweaty blacktop and careened into a maze of wandering gravel roads. Where I was going seemed just a little bit wild.
I should have expected as much. I had been lured out, chasing a mysterious invitation Wabash Professor David Blix had written in The Bachelor to “discover the shadowy region known in these parts as Bal-Hinch.” I was intrigued. Between classes I traced Bal-Hinch to its old Irish roots, “Baile na hInse,” meaning “town of the holm” or “river island.” A shadowy town of the holm, I thought. It rang with mystery I had yet to find in mostly placid Montgomery County. Things function here as a matter of up front simplicity: If the chicken ever crosses the road, it’s only to get to the other side.
So a perfectly unproductive bike ride became my Friday afternoon ritual. After class I would take my 10-speed through the towns and farms of central Indiana as a way of winding down after a hectic week. I rarely tried for a workout, just passed quietly through drowsy towns like Waynetown, New Market, and Darlington, where I would rest long minutes under the covered bridge.
My aging 1970s Torpado bicycle suffered on those rides. Hitting a yawning pothole could punch my tires’ spokes through the rubber tubes like knees through old blue jeans, and my over-stretched chain would fall off when I pedaled up any gravel hill.
I had hoped Bal-Hinch would be an easy ride. It appeared a good omen when I passed through an ancient stock of apple trees hunched along the road, growing around a stone archway marking what was once a bustling farm. A knobby Granny Smith hanging above me was too enticing to pass up. I closed my eyes and bit down hard—a jaw-locking,
eyes-screwing, heart-wrenching sour jolt washed over my tongue.
Such is life in the country. My grandmother’s hands should have taught me this. For more than 80 years they knew the joy
of hard work in the gardens and fruit orchards of her home in Montgomery County. Arthritis has crooked her fingers now into angles unfit for hoeing or tending the apple trees she watched over. Coyotes graze freely on the apples that plunk down from branches out of her reach. The few bushels she does glean she painstakingly crafts into pies, butter, jelly, and applesauce with a thick pinch of cinnamon.
Standing at the stove, she can still watch the birds sifting through a feeder built by my grandpa some 30 years ago. She and my grand-father maintained a constant following of all manner of Hoosier birds: cardinals, song sparrows, nuthatches and sweet chickadees, blue jays, orioles, and regal red-bellied woodpeckers. I picture the two of them every morning scooping crushed seeds into the thatched-roof feeders outside the living room and kitchen windows, then pouring red nectar into the hummingbird feeder by the lilac bush and tomatoes. Now in the first summer since my grandpa’s death, she tends the feeders alone.
Sometimes I ride my bike out to visit her.
“Before he lost his hearing, Paul could tell you the name of any bird by its whistle,” she tells me again over a Sunday dinner.
As I rested my bike among the apple trees, my ears suddenly caught the sound of my grandma’s favorite, the Baltimore oriole. His song carried high and sweet and endless.
“You have an oriole!” I used to shout from my grandparents’ living room window whenever I glimpsed an orange blur outside.
“No, look at his wings again,” she would say. “His wingbars will always be bigger and whiter than this one. This is a robin.” I’d flip through the book. Sure enough, she’d be right. She could have written every page.
Birds are straightforward; you can trust the color of their wings. The dusty roads near Bal-Hinch are a different animal. There’s an old saying I heard down the line from Wabash Professor Vic Powell, longtime resident of Montgomery County: “Bal-Hinch is just a mile down the road, and you never get there.” His saying rang true at every rutted turn. One particular road changed names three times before I finished following it around a field. It ended with a blue iron gate and a hand-painted sign: NO TRESPASSING—VIOLATORS WILL BE PERSECUTED! My directionally impaired sister once explained a piece of sure-fire logic in navigating unknown territory. When she doesn’t know where she is, she simply looks for roads with yellow lines.
“It’s like The Wizard of Oz,” she says. “Yellow lines always lead to gas stations, where you can get souvenirs and directions from creepy guys behind the counter.” Elegant as it was, her logic couldn’t help me find Bal-Hinch, far from any yellow-lined road. I was looking for Offield Monument Road, which meanders through the forgotten acres of the original William Offield farm near the confluence of Rattlesnake and Sugar creeks.
Like many of the other roads around Bal-Hinch, Offield Road is likely a remnant of a path established by Offield long ago.
When he arrived from Tennessee in 1821 as the first settler of Montgomery County, he laid roads as he went, often carrying an axe in his wagon to cut down trees standing in the way. Legend has it that he used saplings strapped to his wagon axles as brakes, dragging them behind over rocks and roots. Rural folk didn’t need well-laid roads because they rarely traveled for work, and almost never for pleasure. In fact, Offield moved about mostly just to get away from people. Twenty years after settling down, he decided that Montgomery County was too overpopulated for his likes. He relocated to Oregon in search of wilder country.
By the looks of things, his roads cut through nothing but wilderness anyway. Basic MapQuest directions like “Take S 325 W to Keller Road, then turn left onto Offield Monument Road” actually turned out to mean: “Go up that hill with the dilapidated barn on your right. After passing the clump of locust trees festooned with grapevines, when you get to the grave of the Revolutionary War soldier, take the road that disappears left into the field.”
My Aunt Millie and Uncle John lived by Rattlesnake Canyon, about 15 miles from my grandparents and just south of where Offield first settled. We used to spend summer weekends at their place. Their house was a one-story modular sheltered in the forest amid ponds and patches of unmowed meadow. It seemed to emerge from deep within the trees—an errant glance and you’d miss it.
My aunt and uncle were endearing, even to an ornery nephew. Their combined quirky personalities inspired a “ducks and fish” theme. My uncle’s favorite brown recliner was nestled between a well-stocked aquarium and a cordless duck phone. And outside there was the “fishin’ pond” in front of the house and the broad “duck pond” in back. Uncle John generously opened the front pond to fishermen.
“Never call your fishin’ pond a fishin’ pond,” he told us. “If you do, your neighbors will catch all your fish.” The boom of his deep bass voice could send ripples sweeping the water in wide circles. The pond trick was a secret we never let out. Even now when my dad takes Grandma fishing there, they still pass the “fishin” pond on the way to the “duck” pond out back. Grandma once caught 64 bluegill there in a single day.
My brother and I were lucky once to pull Uncle John away from a euchre tournament long enough for him to teach us knife throwing. In his back yard we spent a militant morning practicing on the ranks of hickory, dogwood, walnut, oak, and maple standing around us. He cheered every time we buried the three-inch blade of his Buck knife into an unsuspecting trunk.
“Your dad used to spend summers out here,” he told us. “He knew all the animals, birds, and all these trees, too. Take this one here.” He yanked down a handful of leaves.
“Crush ’em up. What do you smell?”
“Kind of like green pepper.”
“Paw-paw,” he said. “Poor man’s banana. Leaves smell like a real pepper. Your dad taught me that.”
A few years after this visit Aunt Millie died of cancer, and only a few years after that Uncle John passed away in his sleep. My cousin found him in the living room, sunken gently into his recliner, embers in the stove still warm from the night before.
Professor Powell was right; I never found Bal-Hinch that day. Finding myself pedaling aimlessly up a darkening hill, I squeezed the brakes, and the bike groaned to a stop. Shadows played on the road from an oak arching over a gaping fencerow. September was slowly falling asleep around me. Since my MapQuest directions were hopeless and my skinny tires a nuisance on the loose gravel, I walked my bike down the hill and through a rustling soybean field in the direction I hoped was right. At the far end of the field I stepped out onto pavement, and there reflecting in the last rays
of the sun I saw two solid yellow lines waiting to lead me home.
