Auto Tour

After navigating the morning traffic around Cincinnati, I left the interstate and joined Rt 50: a two-lane highway that cuts from Ocean City, Maryland to San Francisco. My gas tank was down to a quarter or less and I was stretching to reach Seymour, Indiana to refill.

Before I embarked, my Aunt Gail had offered 10 rules for the road. At the top of the list was “Follow your intuition”, close behind was “Visit any National Wildlife Refuge you can”. So when I saw the sign for Muscatatuck NWR, I turned in. The map at the Visitor’s Center detailed a four-mile driving loop with several short walking trails leading off of it. With Seymour only two miles beyond the refuge entrance, I headed out on the loop, fingers crossed that the four miles (averaging seven miles an hour) wouldn’t eat into the remaining gas too much.

The auto tour is a relic of an older age. I remember visiting Bombay Hook NWR and Edwin B. Forsythe NWR as a child, my parents and I would check the recent sightings list and then crawl around the loop, our speed ranging from ten to zero with intermittent stops to walk to an overlook tower or take a closer look at a bird without the interfering vibrations of the engine. Even then, though I loved the birds, it seemed a bit strange: driving as a form of entertainment.

But it is not just Cricket that is running out of gas. I whole-heartedly believe that our dwindling global fuel supplies will result in some drastic changes in the not-so-distant future. One of which may be the extinction of the auto tour.

So why, you may ask, am I plowing through a tank and a half of gas a day working my way from one ocean to the other? It’s a question I’ve grappled with myself, and one I bring up with some chagrin. One reason is that, in typical American style, I’d like to drive across the country while it’s still an option. I’m also visiting people I dearly love, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. Perhaps to assuage my guilt, I’ll note again that I’ve brought Cricket along for the trip, a fuel-efficient vehicle driven in a way that minimizes my use of fuel (except, I’ll admit, as I drive around the loop at Muscatatuck).



But this morning, creeping between trail heads and impoundments on the refuge, I watched an Indigo Bunting sing from a laden blackberry bush. I marveled at crayfish chimneys lining the path and bruised a pawpaw leaf to make sure I had the correct identification. I watched a Great-blue Heron fish for its lunch and gawked as a Prothonotary Warbler arrowed into the underbrush. Feeling sated, I eased out of the refuge onto route 50 in search of a gas station.