The Brookman Route

The west end of Brookman road where the town of Middleton once stood

The rolling hills of this rural road give few clues to the nearby suburbia

The small town that I live in sits like an island surrounded by what I would call semi-rural countryside.  It's not a hardcore western experience, more like hobby farms and hillsides covered with Christmas trees than anything else.  Yet take a just a few steps beyond the cul-de-sacs crammed full of craftsman style super houses, and you quickly find yourself with a different sense of place.  In our little town of Sherwood, Oregon, you can find this by running in nearly any direction.  Everyone in town is but a few blocks from the country.  

This morning Randy and I once again took advantage of this unique layout.  Anytime we want to add a little grace and exchange bird songs for car exhaust, we head for Brookman road.  It might be needless to say but we add this extension to our runs together most of the time.  I'll sometimes go there by myself, but usually not.

The road itself is pretty old by Sherwood standards.  It intersects both the old west coast highway (99 West) and the old Southern Pacific railroad.  For short time a small town emerged near this junction when the tracks were first laid in the late 1880's.  Nothing remains of "Middleton" now,  although a modern grade school still bears it name.  Stop signs still interrupt the flow of cars although the train tracks there are no longer used.  

The part of the road we run adds two miles to whatever course we have laid out.  The road is generally straight along most of it's bulk although it does throw a pair of right angles at you on the east end.  At no place on Brookman will you find flat road, instead the course is undulating.  A few of the peaks are steep enough to be challenging, but they don't last long,  perfect really for working on strength and pushing yourself over the series of crests.  

There are some houses along the way but mostly you just run past stands of douglas fir trees, orchards, and some fenced pastures.  Some of these have horses.   On the west end of the road there are goats and some place in the middle has a few cows.  I wouldn't dare call them cattle.  If you just have a few of them and they're on Brookman road, they're just cows.  But they are fun to run past.  

Randy and I are not the only ones to run this road.  A quick scan of routes created on the popular "mapmyrun.com" website show many using Brookman.  The most organized and most widely run road race in Sherwood, the "Oregon Run for the Roses",  uses Brookman predominately in it's 10k event. This url shows the route on a map:  http://www.oregonsrunfortheroses.com/10k_run.htm.    But so far I have not seen any other runner out there except during that race.  Maybe because it's a little too dangerous for most folks with it's narrowness and poor line-of-sight visibility, or maybe it's just too remote and isolated for the lone runner.  But being alone can just add to the experience.

It's unclear what the future holds for this little road.  Clearly it is a stones throw from major development and it seems sure that it is just a matter of time before it is engulfed by the same fate as other nearby orchards and farms.  Most importantly Brookman Road is probably best known in Sherwood as the proposed route for a major bypass highway in an effort to ease traffic on other clogged streets.  Although it will likely be awhile before this happens, if it ever does, it can only be a matter of time before this landscape changes forever and the island of Sherwood pushes outward.  

But for now I feel lucky.  Lucky to have a place so close to home that for at least 15 minutes any day I choose, I can run outside of town and feel a little bit country.