I believe I’ve had an incident. It isn’t necessarily, a “senior moment,” but I suppose it’s possible it could be classified as one. At the moment, I’m undecided.
I work in another town, and have to cross several mountains to get there. When I had my car it was an hours drive by the main highway, but for six months I’ve had to drive an old Jeep, because my car’s transmission is on my garage floor. Of course I’ll fix it, I keep telling myself.
So, now it’s an hour and a half over forty-five miles of back roads and mountain roads, so that my slow four-cylinder Jeep can get there without slowing down too much traffic. I keep a watchful eye, and I know where I can pull off and let faster trucks and cars go by. My path takes me through a lot of state forest and farms and horse-and-buggy territory. I see a whole lot of agriculture, and countryside industry, such as concrete pumpers and roofing outfits and wood processing plants. I see country groceries, including a few specifically for the horse and buggy crowd. One thing I’ve learned for sure is that everyone drives too fast, and not because I am slow. It’s because of wild animals. I’ve stopped for so many deer, and for raccoons and squirrels and flocks of turkeys. Had I been traveling at highway speeds like other vehicles, I’d have added to the roadside carnage I see. As it happens, I’ve hit nothing.
On state forest roads I pass through two state parks, both with water resources and fishing. I pass a lot of churches, a lot of small remote homes and cabins. Trees line the back roads and bow over the pavement from both sides, forming high arches. At first I wondered why they’ve been left stand, because they’ll have to fall, blocking the road. And they do. But the reason they are there is because people love those trees, and free passage of traffic at all times is less important than are the trees.
But to be honest, my path to and from work is a tiresome drive. My working shifts are either ten or twelve hours long, and adding three hours to that makes it a long time that I’m not at home. My current string of six straight days is the longest I’ve worked, and today, I’m right in the middle of that. I’m awake all night overnight, and have to drive home each morning, very tired.
Yesterday morning was the reason I’ve sat down to write.
It was a clear morning, close to 8:30 when I left work for home. The sky was a deep azure, dotted with high cumulus clouds, a fluffy white addition to the many colors I’d see. It’s July now, so with drivers side window down, I set out, bird songs and warm breezes and the occasional hurried driver passing either way, my old Jeep’s engine droning.
I cleared the small town where I worked and had crossed Pine Grove mountain, entering Stone Valley and the land of state parks. The highway had been fairly open and fairly busy, and I was already tired of pulling off the road and getting out of the way, but stepping it up to stay out of traffic’s way just wasn’t an option. I didn’t really want to waste gasoline, either, as that’s a significant expense. I was finally descending Greenwood Mountain and was about to break into Big Valley, home of many farms, predominantly Amish and Mennonite. People are friendly there, and they appreciate my slowness, or at least, the horse and buggy people do. Some even wave to me as I pass them, the roads lined with the deep emerald-green of new cornfields.
But today I just wasn’t feeling it. I usually take a caffeine pill before pulling out, to stay alert over the long drive home, but I’d forgotten to, and wasn’t planning to pull over and to root through my bag, looking for the pill bottle. I’d make it.
So the road sometimes looked a bit bleary before me, rolling up under my oversized tires and out behind me. The engine droned and I shifted down, climbed a hill and shifted back up. So tired, such a beautiful morning, but get me home. I’ve got to say, it didn’t feel dangerous to me at the time, but I must have entered la-la land and the twilight zone at about that very moment. Because that is the very last of the road I remember.
I broke into an opening in the trees and could see Big Valley stretched out before me. My next obstacle would be Jacks Mountain, so named for Jack Armstrong, who fur-trapped on it, in about the year 1740. Jack was killed by a band of Delaware Indians for taking some Indian’s horse, for repayment of a debt. His legacy, however, lives on. Jack’s Mountain is big by anyone’s standards, not particularly high, but long, extending through four counties. If you live on the other side of it, you’ve gotta cross it somewhere. The place that I cross it is particularly steep, the road, winding and convoluted, and polluted with buggies, often drawn by two horses because it is so steep. From where I was I could see the cell tower across the valley, where the road would break over the top.
“That’s where I wanna be,” I thought to myself. “That’s where I gotta go.”
I felt the suspension drop as my Jeep silently lifted off the roadway and I was spirited across the valley, high, high in the air, but I would have to gain some altitude to clear Jack’s Mountain. So I did.
I cannot explain by what spiritual mechanism my Jeep took flight, but it was truly wonderful. I gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. I remember thinking, “Accept it! It’s a gift!” I banked by leaning, turned using the steering wheel, and the engine droned.
I knew there were strong updrafts above the mountain, because I’d seen hang gliders launched from it. Wings fluttering in the updraft and craft suspended a few hundred feet above it. Now I was in it, as my Jeep cleared the mountain top and gained altitude, why return to the road now? The Juniata River valley lay spread before me, my home territory, I’d simply fly home. As I would rediscover, things don’t look the same from the air as they do from the surface, when you’re on it.
A landmark, however, was the big diaper manufacturing plant that moved into my area. Advertised as “forty acres under roof,” the company that built it then added to it, a ten-story all-automated warehouse complete with programmed robotic forklifts. It’s hard to miss, and it isn’t that far from my home, so I aimed for that. More or less.
Really, the memory isn’t all that clear. I’ve driven it, it seems like a thousand times so that I know that road like the back of my hand, but I’ve only flown it once. I recall circling about, the sun in my eyes, and the memory fading.
Really, that flight was most of the story, and I’ve just minimalized it to a few paragraphs. I recall the feeling of free, the weight of that vehicle wafting on the wind, the control I had with the wheel, absolutely astounding. It went where I willed it. It moved and sped up and slowed as I asked it to, exactly as I expected it would. I swept in over my home road and under the power lines and softly landed, right there in my driveway. And then, wonder of wonders, I drifted right off to sleep.
Has anything like this ever happened to you? I recall vividly awakening in my parent’s driveway when I was eighteen. It was four in the morning and my headlights were on, I fought to awaken because I thought I’d wrecked my car, somewhere. When I realized I was alive and that I’d shut the engine off, I settled down, gripped my chest and breathed a short thank-you prayer, even though at that age, I wasn’t much for prayer. I turned my headlights off and went in, to sleep.
Well, it’s some fifty years later, and this time it was broad daylight, and ten in the morning. But I was rested as if I’d slept for awhile, and that just didn’t compute. Because it takes me an hour and a half to drive home, and that’s what time it was. How could I have slept, for any length of time?
But the real anomaly was my gas gauge. It hadn’t dropped nearly as much as it should have, for the trip home.
So did I drive it? Or did I actually fly?
You can bet, I’ll find out tomorrow.
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