November 6, 2020
Somehow I crossed the Rockies after the snow; which was whiter? my knuckles on the steering wheel or the mountains? Slush and ice patches on the road and rows of fast moving semi-trucks squeezing me from all sides, harrowing indeed. I arrive in Strasburg, Colorado and find a place to spend the night. The woman at the registration desk says to me, “You look like you could use a pizza. We’ll deliver it hot from the oven to your camper.” Who could say no to that?
In the morning, a scrawny young cowboy lurches by wearing his bedroom slippers, a desultory cigarette hangs from his hungover lip and a motorcyclist zooms by with a white scarf sailing behind his throat. Hasn’t he heard of Isadora Duncan, I think, strangled by her scarf in a motorcar, be careful I say as he passes. Interstate 70 is clear and the sun shines. I pass hundreds of windmills but not a breeze stirs them and below not a single dead bird contrary to admonitions of someone we heard on the news. No birds anywhere for that matter, but a single white gull with black wing tips soaring over the snow this morning as I left Glenwood Springs.
Snowball the camper has turned completely gray from the slush of the highway and joyfully gets a bath in in a tall drive-through washer, she almost shakes like a big dog come from a swim. By the time we finish scrubbing her up there’s a line-up of cars behind us, I hear a man yell behind me, “Get going, it’s clean enough!” And it’s on through the flat land of eastern Colorado. Fields of dry grassland and on a small rise sits a pink 1960’s Cadillac like an emblem of some forgotten party time. I see a sign for Colorado Oats and then there’s a feed lot for cattle, cows trapped in a small fence with all the room in the world around them. Doesn’t seem quite right.
In Kansas the cows roam free and the grasses are still green. I keep moving east trying to stay ahead of any inclement weather. Coming into Missouri there’s an adult toy store called Passions, I pass it by, but the the sign for Boots, Britches, Bullets and Bologna, now that’s enticing. It’s windy in Illinois, In Indiana I cross the Wabash River, the Big Bayou River, the Black River, the Wabash and Erie Canal. Do school children still sing, “I’ve got a mule and her name is Sal, fifteen miles on the Erie Canal…?”
Think how we learned history, correct or not, romanticized certainly, from the songs we sang as children. Now kids are on their phones listening to music I no longer understand. Households quiet as everyone is plugged in to their own individual tunes. How odd really when music is much of what connects us. One hundred years ago a status symbol was a piano in the living room. Today it is the giant television screen; it’s even difficult and expensive to get rid of an upright piano now, but it is all of usable parts. How we need to sing together! Think of the Star Spangled Banner at games and events, one person sings thrillingly into a microphone while we stand silent with our hats in hand, hands on heart. We should all sing together, struggle with the high notes, croak it out the best we can, there is power in our collective voice and while we’re at it, I think we should be singing America the Beautiful. We need to crown our good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
I recently met a man, an opera singer, who once participated in opera education classes in the schools of Seattle. I think it’s time for some music, I’ll ask him to sing a song for us, maybe he will, let’s see.
Coming into Louisville I’m hemmed in by a political flag waving horn honking train of cars as I try to find the exit, the election only a day away. I listen to the map lady on the phone and holding course am able to find my friend’s house. We welcome one another and say, “You don’t look a day older.” Once we met after a long absence, and didn’t recognize one another. I waiting in a wheelchair outside the Delta gate and she suddenly snowy white haired. She stared, circling several times and finally said, “Is that you?” and I said, “Is that you?” And we laughed and laughed. The laughter never changes, it is the best.
My friend serves us hot delicious soup for dinner with crusty warm bread and lots of butter. We talk about the election trying to avoid the difficult parts of this last year. But our favorite topics are our travels and adventures. We love the wide open west, the colors of Utah and New Mexico. Once we camped together for a week at the north rim of the Grand Canyon and learned the names of the layers of rock: Kaibab, Toroweap, Coconino, Hermit Shale, Supai Group, Redwall, Muav, Bright Angel Shale. We talk about our encounters with wild animals, the plants and trees we love, the birds that delight us. We celebrate her birthday with chocolate and toast the election results, hopeful.
In the morning over coffee we remember Doctor Fuchs, and her bassett hound roaming our college campus at night between the birches, fifty feet of clothesline wrapped around her chubby middle unwinding as they threaded through the trees. More than once leaving the library in the dark we were entangled in the spider maze of Dr. Fuch’s dog line. What was that dog’s name? Professor Bassett? That couldn’t have been it. Our laughter at our forgetting connects us in the long rope of our friendship, and we, grateful and silly, see only the Bright Angel Shale of our love and delight in one another.
Another few days of laughter and forgetting and it’s time to move east again, toward Maryland, first along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and then through hills and rolling hills of late fall color and into to the vortex of urban traffic and the comfort of my east coast family. Grandchildren home from school, we are wary and masked, yet it is soon Thanksgiving. Yes, we say, we are thankful, we are still healthy.
With thanks to Jill Davenport, an intrepid, entertaining, and always curious friend.
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