It's hard to believe it's been 10 years since we lost Barkley. But I am so happy with all the photos we took, especially the ones we took during our commute from Indy to Chicago for several years. I never took my eyes off the road; I just held up the little point-and-shoot, aimed it into the back of the truck, and took a shot. Thanks for the memories.
Mom, that's like the third burger place you've passed up!
As the truck headed south, into farmland, happy to be away from the thicker traffic, the snow was still piled high from the massive storm almost two weeks ago. The drifts looked so serene, waves tossed up against farm fence, but other signs told of the dangers that had been here, two cars still in ditches and the one jackknifed semi in the median, as well as spots where a Saturn and a Smart Car shed their skin, bits of fiberglass and plastic strewn about, the rest of the remains removed in a bucket.
But we were even happier to be past the city's outskirts, that short stretch I must travel that makes me very anxious not to break down. There's one stretch where, but for the highway and the knowledge, you wouldn't know you were in a city.
There are the houses, some farm style, probably erected when this
was just farms, fading and falling, some windows shuttered or broken, some still lived in, overgrown plots littered with the broken and the unused, buckets, tools, machines, things that once were crafted to serve a purpose of function or work, left to lie idly by those that either abandoned these places or live idle within. Even the trees, bend down as if tired of making an effort, blossoming each year in the sullied impiety that is a once thriving place that dies through uncaring neglect, its burgeoning, nothing more a bitter and tenacious scrap of another season's memory, than a desire to grow and thrive.
With a sigh of relief, I take that final dogleg south.
This stretch of highway has been driven a hundred times, yet I notice something different on each drive. It's not the obvious, giant "
HELL IS REAL" sign (we're on I-65, we already know that) or the
XXX Family Restaurant (sorry, when I think "XXX", family restaurant just doesn't spring to mind). Instead, it's an old barn, now razed, a river that's left its banks, a tiny little cross with a name by the side of the road.
I don't listen to books on tape for these drives. Sometimes, music plays; sometimes it is silent. Mostly, I keep my senses on the road, for this is a treacherous stretch of large trucks, often as inattentive as they are massive. Sometimes you have one in front and one behind and gaining, no place to go if the one in front decides to stop, the Bat Truck only
the Oreo filling between several tons of steel, and I retreat to the slow lane, where I'll happily let teenagers give
me that "look" as I do the speed limit. I've driven this stretch often enough to know that the opposing forces of a semi's mass and my will, if drawn suddenly together, would be a meeting that could be
irremediable.
Sometimes they give you a warning before they try to kill you, a signal before they suddenly dart into your lane, just feet in front of you, making you slam on your brakes, so they can pass the truck going
.3 mph less than them. Usually, though, the danger is inarticulate, not knowing it's danger. So I listen as well as watch.
There are always the signs, fast food, gas stations, some bright shiny new, an Arby's, and a Super 8 that's been a welcome respite from this road in bad weather for many people. There's a new McDonald's, advertising large clean restrooms (a welcome change from the ones further north, where they have to lock them because someone might break in and clean them). Then there are old signs, weathered, leaning away from the wind. Failed businesses dot the landscape, "
Boom City", a faded but futuristic-looking abandoned fireworks place that stands in isolation in a landscape of cornfields. So out of place in a remote, rural area, it looks like some alien craft that just landed there and built itself a parking lot as they waited for the mother ship.
What is there to look at, some of you may be thinking? It's Indiana, flattened out by giant glaciers millions of years ago. It's flat, there's corn, that's about it. But beauty can be like that, as subtle as a whisper, yet as strong as faith. Beauty isn't always young, perfect skin, vast mountains, or the vivid colors of velvets and fine gems. Beauty is there, on an open road, in the sky, in a vast field of ripe corn, in a church with a crucifix that likely came out here on a wagon, the serene and battered Christ upon it, transcending the marks of time and generations, a visage to which you can only lower your eyes in humility and ask forgiveness.
Yes, it's flat, but some roads stretch and glisten like jewels in hard rain flowing down as if to wash the landscape clean. There are weathered homes and stubborn farms, there is a sudden rise to a river that has carried more than history to its silent end. There are miles and miles of fields, with nothing but corn and fence rows, a barn, and silo jutting up like one of those pop-up greeting cards, set there, flat on the very edge of the earth's table. It's the windy sunlight of space and summer, a morning filled with bells, an afternoon filled with grace, it's the church of God's creation, as farmers tend to its Host and our history.
As I drive and look, I think
—to the phone hopefully not ringing at 2 a.m., to the days ahead, to the days past as I see the Indianapolis 103 miles sign and realize I'm more than halfway there, smiling as I relax into the seat.
There's a time in every trip when you settle into the drive, no matter how long. As a family, and for my Dad, when we were kids, driving on our vacation trips seemed almost effortless, as we watched the landscape change from green to brown to mountains and back to brown. We'd hear stories of his youth, of him and Mom growing up together in Montana, the radio off, the only music the sound of my Mom's relaxed laughter, a laughter I can still sometimes hear. For I hear her voice in mine. I'm told we sound alike, and there are days I can crack open the window and the warmth of the wind will blow in and around me, warming my cheeks and the back of my throat and as look up to a contrail that has caught my eye, our laughter will echo in the wide spaces ahead.
What I recall of those long-ago trips, other than the laughter, was just sitting and looking out the windows for miles, for what was most memorable were the landscapes, stopping when we got tired or thirsty, and actually looking and touching the wonders we'd read about in school. The Grand Coulee Dam, the drive-through redwood tree. Then back in the car, with postcards and maybe a souvenir baseball hat. I saw mountains and tumbling landslides, and fish leaping against gravity up a ladder, and once even a buffalo, kept on a small piece of range on which resided a little restaurant.
I had never in my life been next to an animal that big. He was old and completely tame, raised by the husband and wife at the restaurant, with a few acres to roam and enough wild memory to twitch in running freedom in his dreams. I was afraid at first to approach him, almost blind in my fear, but I crept up, drawn by soft eyes the color of earth, and the warm flank. Judging by his breathing, the slow, patient release of air, that great steam engine of sound, I knew he would not hurt me. I reached out through the fence rails and touched the giant soft velvet bloom of his nose as he looked back with those knowing eyes, set in ancient bones as enormous as the future, a countenance as powerful as history, as motionless as memory. And we stood together, a little auburn-haired girl and that lone remnant of a past that's faded to nothing but dust and cornered thought, all alive, yet still alone.
But on this drive, all I am thinking about is what I have in front of me, the tumbled landscapes of glacier stone and great pristine rivers, thin as a rope from the air. Anything that really requires my mind, the gas and engine instruments, a scan for traffic, occurs in brief, unhurried intervals as the truck carries me with it, all those memories and thoughts of past road trips, of tears, of childlike bursts of laughter, of family, mechanical, rhythmic memory of the past that I carry with me forward.
Everything that I might worry about, whether the phone will wake me at 2 a.m., that case I have to finish, a washer that broke beyond repair and needs to be replaced, lies suspended for this time as the sun creeps back inside the earth, driving the shadows forth.
The open road, a dimension free of time and space that flows from childhood to the trembling, secret ardor of the future. It's a road little changed from a child's hand out the window in the breeze, to the older foot on the gas pedal of an old British car, on a Summer day, pressing down, carrying with it the echo of childish want, the passion, and unrest of adulthood. The road rushing under, rushing on. Way too quickly.
As we near where I will live during the work week, Barkley leans into me, as if recognizing what is going past the window, flowing smoothly from left to right, buildings, and doorways, a small expanse of marsh, each in its ordered place, there in the dimming light. Perhaps he recognizes those things as we draw near. Either that or he is listening to something much further away than the small, confined vehicle we inhabit. Perhaps he only pretends to be listening because, in his heart, he already knows the sound.
I listen to, not just look, to the whoosh of the garage door, to the creak of a door, to the feeling of falling into a simple place with old Mission furniture, a framed photo on the shelf, and a Cross on the wall, reminding me that I am all alive but never alone.
LB Johnson
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