Been thinking about…The empty highway in the night

The old sliding window lock would have been shiny brass except for the number of times it had been painted white with thick, cheap house paint. The window didn’t open anyway and the corners of the window were filled with mud dauber nests, the slow, friendly wasps buzzing regularly in the end of the summer season’s heat. They are quiet now, though, quiet in the midnight dark even as the dark, haunted space still smells of something akin to motor oil, and ripening Concord grapes. Outside the window climb the old, thick, papery brown vines of the grape arbor. All September afternoon, the wasps and yellow jackets hummed over the grainy sidewalk concrete with the cracks, yellow jackets swarming the sweet grape nectar even as deft hands brushed them away. Concord grapes are special and, when enough buckets were gathered in the fall, we made grape jelly in a cool kitchen of pale green tile and florescent light that was never quite bright enough.

But now, through the window and the window’s cobwebs, the eastern sky is bright with starlight. A million stars, and million stars’ lights, all brightening the night with light so very old. Some of those stars have already died out long ago but we are watching their lights in the sky of a strange memory and place long gone as well. In what light there is, the grape leaves look huge, moving deftly in the night breeze. Across the yard, the barn’s lights are still on, simple, bare lightbulbs of warm, incandescent light dimmed by the barn dust, muted by life, memory and the ruffled sounds of chickens slowly falling asleep. The barn at night is a quiet, calming place, a space where, but for a moment, all is right with the world. Beyond the night, the coyotes call.

Old and new, forever colliding here in this garage, symbol of 1960s’ prosperity, two cars and all. New and old, forever colliding. My dad’s perennially new suburban or van, smelling of fresh wax, and a mishmash of tools, old saws, the always-too-loud air compressor, and a near-antique refrigerator painted a garish, shiny orange and filled up with my dad’s beer and — during holiday season — extra pumpkin pies. An antique set of drawers, acquired for cheap at a farm sale, is stacked with oil filters and oil and discarded art projects while, like some strange hieroglyphics, a series of cartoon dinosaurs peek out from behind skis and old posters and more shelves (my sister had drawn the dinosaurs once with a handful of nubby crayons to entertain me once as very, very small child).

Far above and tracing a line across the window flies a transcontinental jet — some big-body airliner — crossing the night, signal lights blinking in sequence. In a few moments, its faint roar reaches the earth here amid the memories and grapevines and still-hot summer-like night even as autumn closes in, even as the decades pass. Which year is it, again? Perhaps 1998, or 1979, or 2006, and another airliner is crossing the same path all over again, and the people in that pressurized tube 30,000 feet above are sleeping, or worrying, or thinking about how important their lives are, with no possible way of knowing that far below in one nameless Midwest county in the black of night, the grapevines are swaying and a still-young man is staring forever into the night sky, watching their traverse with the dispassionate interest in which one watches comets or shooting stars. In another moment, the plane has passed from sight as it continues into the western horizon, chasing a now-lost sun. Little do the passengers realize they are recreating a very old Greek myth.

Another moment, another plane, another rotation of sun and moon, another life, another death and in some strange way I’m yet standing in that garage, staring out into the deep night but this time, the garage is empty, the whole place devoid of life despite the blue light of the moon streaming through the window.

No longer my home, no longer a place to which I will ever return. The garage doors are open, blue light tracing one last time down the gray gravel, down past the cedar trees and the plums, past the pussy willows and weeping willow whose ghost stands near a culvert still silhouetted by towering black locust where the crown vetch still perfume the night, crown vetch waving gently in the dark as I pass. I pause one last time by the brown metal gate that creaks gently in the wind and the blue dash lights of the truck gently light face and hands and hopes in an unknown future. Nothing behind upon which to lean but only remember, and only a future ephemeral, unknown. Turn signal to the west is as unnecessary as it is inevitable. It was inevitable that this was how it would all end, and begin.

And so in this, the deep and hazy blue midnight in that strange space between summer and fall, I turn right, away from the past, away from the forest timber that once knew me and once remembered me, and point the truck — not unlike a modern-day horse on that mythical rim between day and night, past and present, east and west, good and bad — to follow that now-lost sun. Some decisions are final. And some turns can only lead to futures both bleak and good.

The engine hums again, full of life, and the truck’s speed quickens, now beneath an empty sky where there is nothing but empty highway in the night ahead.