Road Trip

I am blissfully in the middle of our annual weekend getaway in Northern California with a select group of very close friends.  We eat meals prepared with vegetables picked from the farm minutes before consumption.  We indulge in long analyses of books and movies while the night grows dark and the frogs came out around us.  We listen and play music, old favorites, laughing at ourselves as we forget lyrics that were once as engrained as our telephone numbers (which we now forget also).  It is a wonderful weekend, and I am deeply grateful I am healthy enough to be here for this one.

The road trip up was an intensely welcome break away from our daily scramble to keep it together. Once I got off the phone, and text, and email, putting out the fires of drama still raging on various fronts without me, I was able to slowly sink into the groove of a road trip.  The dip and glide of power lines, hypnotically swooping next to the road. The dancing leaves of the cottonwoods, shimmering by the creeks down in the gulleys.  Little wooden cottage motels, saying Vacancy in neon.

The central valley, rows of crops slicing out to the vanishing point.  Stockyards of the complacent and the doomed, methane hanging heavy for a mile downwind.  Mostly what seduces me is the white noise sound of the warm wind buffeting the windows, the wide soft blue sky arcing above us, so serene, so benign.

Comparing all this to the Hieronymus Bosch underground of my current life. The world of the sick and deformed, pained and patient, weary and worried and war torn.  Humanity at its most vulnerable and real. Rooms filled with sighing tubes, soft electronic indicators. Both warm and terrifying, comforting and blood chilling.  I keep my eyes averted from the feet dragging off the wheelchairs, the grotesque swollen bruises, the hands held together by exoskeletons of wires and levers and screws. I walk through the infusion rooms, seeing people in their most private and desperate hours, fighting their quiet battles for a better chance to live.

The world on the road is three dimensional, solid. We are the red and white corpuscles moving through the arterial systems.  Masses through space, spinning wheels.  The horizon is a clean flat line, the world a simple bisection with the sky on top, and the land below.  Sickness and health, numbers and diagnoses.... these do not concern the vast natural world, only our singularly intense human one.

Join our Team written on the back of a semi, and I always consider it.  Well, there'd be some time away from home.  And probably a cut in pay.  And, well, yes, the truckstops could be a bit sketchy for a middle aged white woman.  But I always consider it.  Always go down that path.  Always dream a little dream of living in a world where the high power lines march beside the road, and time is measured in miles.