A Quiet Ride Home Becomes a Peaceful Road Trip Into the Past
In the back seat, the children sleep as my husband drives us into the coppery glare of the setting sun. He squints in silence, maneuvering through his own thoughts, and I stare out the window. After a weekend in the mountains, spent in retreat from the holiday rush that was threatening to obliterate the joy of the season, we are returning home. Filled with something at least approaching peace, I am trying very hard not to make lists.
To-do lists and to-get lists and to-call lists and to-make lists. If I let them, the muscles in my neck will gather in hand-wringing groups, my stomach lurch about restless and fretful as a newborn, and I will lose the weekend. So I look out the window and over the hills, between the shadows and the sky and find that place that is no place, where the edges blur and mental lists wander into dreams. And a strip mall in Pomona becomes the woods around my parents’ house on a gray winter afternoon when every tree shone with ice, branches clicking together in the wind like prayer beads. In a blink, the woods give way to my brother’s great roar of a laugh as we walk down an autumn street, and then the heavy paws of my childhood dog hitting my shoulders in welcome.
The road flies faster, the sun settles lower and thought blurs into feeling--a snowball full of stones against my mouth, the sleekness of my grandmother’s fingers just before she died, the sweaty anxiety of the first day of fifth grade.
I look out over the tawny hills, so far from where I was born, and think of other women coming here from far away, leaning into the shift and rattle of the wagons, the clatter of those long-ago trains. Did they gaze at the horizon and try to place themselves? Did they, too, wonder what exactly had happened during the years of their lives to bring them right here, right now?
I have done some of my best, and worst, thinking from behind a moving pane of glass. I have saved the world, won many awards and wallowed in self-pity, made great resolutions and spoon-fed my inner demons. But mostly, I have remembered. In another time, I might have found reverie elsewhere--on a porch swing during summer’s twilight, or a rocking chair on a winter Sunday. There, I might have taken up a skein of wool or pan of unsnapped beans, and traveled into night and memory.
But here in this world, in this life, there is little time unaccounted for, few opportunities for daydreaming. Only in the car is there the enforced stillness necessary for contemplation. And there is something about motion that provokes revelation--the strangers sharing confidences on a train, the poet searching for America from a Greyhound window. Travel is a speeded-up version of life--we glimpse other outposts, other choices, but follow our own road and then they are gone. We begin in one place and emerge in another still ourselves. The air may be colder, the voices unfamiliar, but we are still the same in our skins. We are still hungry and curious and longing, still grateful and tired and needing a bathroom.
In between here and there is the road, a no-man’s-land where things may be said, visions conjured, memories unearthed and no harm done. I am talking to the window, I am talking to the encroaching night. I will not be here tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. The children are sleeping and my husband wandering in his own vivid fields, so thoughts rise like fish, fast and fleet, and I may follow them where ever they lead. A tantric road trip.
It’s easy to forget that part of any trip is the trip itself. The transport of body from one place to another so often feels like part of an admission price for the actual event. But humans move not only to get from here to there but because we need to move. Because in movement there is rhythm not found in rest, in travel there are vistas, internal and external, not found in work.
The road is the inevitable metaphor for life, and sometimes we need to hear it singing beneath us so we can remember what it stands for, so we can revisit in our mind’s eye the many miles we have already traveled.
