[This is the second of four pieces on the 2008 presidential campaign.]

OUT ON OLD ROAD 44

On the campaign trail, today is State Road 44 day for me.

I’ve driven (or been driven on) Road 44 most of my life. It’s a twisted strand of two-lane road that goes uphill and down, around right-angle turns, from Franklin southwest to Martinsville, Indiana. When I was a kid, it was the only way to get from our home in Vincennes, in the state’s southwest corner, to my grandfather’s home in Franklin. I loved the curvy, up-and-down road as much as my father hated it. When he was running our car on wartime kerosene, the hills of Road 44 were murder on the engine, and he had to stop every so often, at places like Bud and Mount Nebo, to let things cool. Many years later, I came close to losing two of my children on Road 44. David, with his brother Colin as passenger, took one of the curves too fast on an icy day and did a 360 in the middle of the road. My great-great-grandfather is buried in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, beside Road 44.

 In all that time, I’ve never really looked at houses along the road. But today I’m looking at (and for) houses, armed with an address list supplied by the local Obama campaign. It’s a gorgeous fall Sunday afternoon in Indiana, but Road 44 is as cantankerous as ever. Just finding houses in these  boondocks is a challenge, and I skip one address because the house is surrounded by police cars and units of the Trafalgar Volunteer Firemen (yes, that’s what’s on the side of the trucks—no gender-equality nonsense about “firefighters” here). At the next house a woman wipes sweat from her brow as she explains that she’s been out trying to keep the grass fire next door from reaching her family’s barn. “We’re for Obama,” she says—but it’s clearly not the time for a political discussion.

 As always, driving Road 44 is enough to make a driver lose his religion. Numbers on mailboxes are small, scanty, and confused. Which side of Centerline Road is No. 1865 on, anyway? And do the numbers run up or down? Traffic is much heavier on Road 44 than in my youth, so I have to be careful turning on or off it. And careful about backing from a driveway onto a road where a curve or the crest of a hill may be only 50 feet away.

 The drama only begins with the road. At No. 611, a woman closes the door firmly in my face when she sees my Obama button. “You’re at the wrong house,” she says. And down the road at No. 570, I bounce the car down a rough and pitted gravel drive to a house that appears wrecked and abandoned, despite two pickup trucks, a yard strewn with trash, and a hose snaking out an open door into the bushes. No one answers my knock. I leave an Obama leaflet in the door and move on.

 A little further I make a turn into a wrong address. I hear gunfire, and see—a little way off—three or four men firing rifles behind a barn. It seems a good time to move out smartly and find the right address. (When Sarah Palin spoke to 20,000 people near Indianapolis last week, a sign in the crowd said, “Guts, guns, and Sarah.”)

Sometimes the reception along Road 44 is friendly. At No. 874, a woman and her two teenage sons invite me in for a half-hour discussion about politics. She’s leaning toward Obama, she says, but is worried because friends are telling her he’s Muslim. And what’s Obama’s position on gun control, she asks? (Answer: No problem with hunting and recreation, but he’s tired of kids being killed on the streets of Chicago—or Indianapolis.) Her 15-year-old son, a non-voting McCain supporter, peppers me with questions (good ones) about Obama’s experience and his tax proposals. “Tell me something you like about McCain,” he says, and this is easy—his personal courage, his integrity, his sense of humor.

Down the road, at No. 808, Johnny Rees talks long and thoughtfully about the campaign. He’s a Republican and the father of four, who drives 80 miles to a job where his employer is cutting back hours in the economic slump. He says Christ turned his life around in the 1990s, and he’s taught a young people’s Sunday School class just this morning. He wishes Obama were more firmly against abortion, but the economy is moving him toward supporting him anyway. He listens to news on NPR as he drives to and from work. Race doesn’t bother him, he says—“my family never was that way.” And he adds, “The first black president—that would be something.  Maybe then we could put that subject behind us.” As I leave he says, “I haven’t said this to anybody but you, but I think I probably will vote for Obama.”

 What with the long discussions and searching for addresses and trying to keep from getting killed on Road 44, this is not a very productive day on the campaign trail—at least not in numbers of voter contacts. After four hours, I’ve knocked on 13 doors and talked to eight voters—two are for Obama, two are leaning toward him, three are for McCain, and one is undecided. That’s very close to the distribution among the hundred or so people I’ve talked to over the last month. It mirrors almost precisely what the polls in red-state Indiana are saying. It’s going to be a very close election here—if Obama can pull it off, he’ll be the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to do so.

 It’s after 4 p.m. now, and time to quit. The Indianapolis Colts come on in a few minutes against  Green Bay, and nobody in Indiana wants to talk politics while the Colts are playing.

 At home I tally up the statistics. I’m halfway through probably the toughest address list I’ve had from the campaign—a lot harder stumping than in subdivisions, apartment complexes, or compact city blocks. Yesterday  I knocked on 24 rural doors, with 14 voter contacts. The breakdown so far on this list: six strongly for Obama, three leaning that way, seven strongly for McCain, two undecided. It seems a long way from Sarah Palin’s 20,000 fans or the 100,000 who turned out yesterday for Obama at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

 Tomorrow, I’ll try to finish the list—Road 44 is done except for two houses I never found, but I have 21 addresses to go on country roads with names like W 100 N and S 75 W. Overall, I’m at 363 doors knocked (plus a couple of hundred in the primary), and I’d like to get to 500 during the next two weekends. Then, please God, this marathon will be over.