Most of us live in “built-up” areas with paved roads, pairs of traffic lanes that are each 20 feet wide or wider, even streetlights and concrete curbing.

I lived there too, for most of my working life. In the 1950s, I traversed dirt roads during hunting and fishing seasons and jaunts just to joyride.

Last week, I reflexively tightened my grip on the steering wheel and shifted my pickup truck into four-wheel-drive, almost without noticing.

I was again on Frozen Toe Road in northwestern Jefferson County, just west of Sigel, leaning toward Fisher. I insert “Frozen Toe Road” into my writing often, because I enjoy typing “Frozen Toe Road” almost as much as I enjoy the quizzical facial expressions when I mention it in conversation, usually met with, “You’re kidding me. There isn’t really a real Frozen Toe Road, is there?”

Umm … yup, there is. Its 2.5-mile length shinnies south-to-north up a hill, through a state game lands parcel, and past the one lone building for most of its length, the eponymous “Frozen Toe Lodge.”

The road is … what? Clay, in copious amounts that cloud your windshield or, if wet, slip-slide beneath your tires. Rock? Yep, mostly rounded-top melon-sized roundheads common beneath our area’s topsoil. Gravel? Sometimes it is modern gray-white crushed limestone, spread by a thoughtful township crew or an energetic landowner tired of wheel-jarring potholes. More often, the gravel is as clay-tan as the road itself, pit-dug or river-dredged.

Traffic is sparse, though within the past decade the “Big Brown” of UPS and the white-and-red of FedEx trail after the private vehicles of rural postal delivery folks. I admire the skill of those delivery drivers, postal and private. In bad weather, my own Meals on Wheels delivery trips whiten my knuckles and tighten my gluteals as I slip, slide, bounce, twist and, grimace with worry as to what is coming, especially climbing up toward blind hilltops.

We call those roads “dirt roads,” as opposed to “hard roads,” the catchall term for surfaces paved with asphalt or concrete or hardened to dust-lessening surfaces with redirected petroleum brine or oils.

Dirt they are, for most of the year, claying the sides of passing vehicles except when winter whitens them with snow or ice or storms sluice gray-brown water across them.

In our springtime, large yellow hulks crawl, creep and cut along those roads. Township workers’ graders, loaders and rollers smooth out the gouges left by the winter freeze-thaw cycle and the wear and tear from logging trucks, trash trucks and other behemoths that obviously exceed the usual 10-ton weight limitations on small bridges. I am told that these trucks must be allowed, weight limits or not, because residents demand it. I am also told (but do not know for sure) that some bonding requirements come into play if those bridges are damaged.

Back when I was a reporter, I would have nosed into that. These days, as a geezer, I merely muse about it.

But one cannot get too lost in thought. Those blind hilltops and sharp curves squeeze the supposed two traffic lanes. There is space for but one vehicle at a time. Regular drivers of rural roads are adept at the do-si-do of swerving sideways or flipping a shift lever into reverse, then backing to the most recent pullover or facsimile thereof.

These vehicular dances are usually courteous affairs; you back up today for me, I will back up tomorrow for you. The pucker factor reasserts itself when “berm” is replaced by “drop-off” down a steep hillside with nary a guide rail in sight.

Township and borough road crews keep these roads passable. I do not know how they do it. My knowledge is limited to driving on those roads, not to understanding the secrets of clay, rock, water and weather that must be mastered to actually build or maintain rural unpaved roads.

A few of the roads still in use in our boondocks are flanked by tangled overgrowth that hides the steep cuts through shale and bedrock originally hewn by men using mules and wagons, shovels and picks and the road-builder’s salvation (and, sometimes, maimer), “dy-nee-mite.”

Those who farmed around here a century and more ago often also mined, either professionally or occasionally. Moving stumps, rock and dirt with dynamite, gunpowder or nitroglycerine was commonplace. I appreciate the passageways, but shudder at the long-ago cost in labor and injuries.

Eventually, Markel and Wishaw roads, Big Dam and Jim Town, Mays and Greenwalt bump up against another “hard road.” I swing onto Route 28, back westward into Brookville, then north to home via Route 36 and Caldwell Corners roads, all of them paved.

I park and walk toward the house, then stop and turn. I smile.

The tan-brown smudges and streaks speckle my truck’s burgundy side panels. I have again brought the dirt roads back with me, on my truck and in my mind’s eye.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor/publisher at newspapers in DuBois, Brookville, New Bethlehem and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: notniceman9@gmail.com.