Kelsee Brady, managing editor

I’ve been at Berry since the fall of 2018, and no one was more thrilled than I to discover that Berry had plans to repave stretch. More formally known as Lavender Mountain Road, stretch is the colloquial name for the road from Main Campus to Mountain Campus. There have always been rumors about why stretch was in such bad shape, and they varied wildly. Every summer, Berry would meticulously patch certain areas that somehow always needed repatching the next year and every year, Berry students wondered if it would every be repaved. 

Throughout my past three and a half years at Berry, I have driven down stretch countless times and every time, I wondered if this was the time that I would get a flat tire from the pot holes or the massive speed bump that somehow always surprised me.

Naturally, I was overjoyed to hear that it was being resurfaced, but now that they have finished the project, stretch doesn’t feel the same. I never realized how much I enjoyed the challenge of trying to avoid the potholes and ridges in the road. While I didn’t love the feeling of not knowing exactly where the edges of the road were, the fluorescent striping that we have now is a big adjustment. 

During the construction process, the wait times were abysmal and the one lane traffic was less than ideal, but I loved the look and feel of stretch when it was basically a dirt road. Once the resurfacing was finished, before the striping was completed, I felt like I was in “Cars” riding down the newly paved road for the first time. 

Driving down stretch is now a much easier task and it feels like driving down any other road. The fluorescent yellow and white stripes make the trees and woods around you disappear in their glow and when another car passes you, the stripes are lit up for what seems like a mile in front of you. Somehow, just repaving a road changed the entire experience. While I understand the necessity of striping for safety purposes, I don’t think stretch requires it. The striping feels too modern for the old-timey feel that stretch used to have. 

When I think about future freshman and prospective students coming to Berry, it hurts to realize that they won’t even know what stretch used to be. They will see it as any other road and they won’t have the same fears that we did driving down the pothole-riddled road. They won’t know that it didn’t have stripes and they won’t know how it felt to race around potholes, hoping that a deer wasn’t crossing the road ahead. 

Don’t get me wrong. I am very grateful for the improvement, but it’s going to take some time before I fall back in love with stretch. But, I’ll never forget the way that stretch used to make me feel, like I was lost in the moment, free and alone in nature.