Hardscrabble Road

I drive across the North Country a lot, and have noticed a number  of roads share similar names. No matter where I am, there always seems to be a River Road, or a Sugar Bush Road, or a Maple Lane. Standard stuff.  But there are two roads at opposite ends of the North Country that caught my eye. Their shared name: Hardscrabble Road.

I noticed the first Hardscrabble Road when I initially moved up here last summer. It’s in St. Lawrence County on Route 68, between Ogdensburg and Canton, just outside of Flackville. It’s utterly bucholic, surrounded by farms, Amish and otherwise, corn fields, old barns. “Huh,” I thought when I first saw it. “I bet it’s rough in the winter up here.”

The second Hardscrabble Road is far to the east, off of Route 3 in Clinton County, between Saranac and Cadyville. The road crosses the Saranac River.  When I stopped to take a picture of it, my reaction was laregely the same. “Huh. Must get cold over this way.”

Hardscrabble is an honest adjective. It gives us a different sense of what life on those roads is like, truer than a road named for a sugar shack or river or stand of trees ever could. Now, when I drive past those roads, I think about their initial inhabitants and the people that named them—how they managed to eke by in those hardscrabble days. And I wonder what life is like on those roads now. So tell us—is your road a hardscrabble one, in name or in character?  And have you, liked me, ever been moved or made curious by something so simple as a street name?