AiRMail 6/23/24

A lot of truth in this, if memory serves me.

                                                    Mountain Ode
Driving this winding road, nobody here but me. I’ve got the radio on. Seems like every song is about heartbreak. I know something about heartbreak. Broke some hearts, lost my heart. My own damn fault.
Today, driving this winding road, I’m remembering my introduction to West Virginia. It was on the back of a motorcycle, a little red Suzuki 250 cc., and I was with then-boyfriend, the one whose heart I broke to take up with the one who broke my heart. Final exams at Ohio State were over, and we took to the road, headed for Atlantic coast beaches. Via the backroads, no interstates, no turnpikes.
             We had a big double sleeping bag, a small pup tent, jeans, flannel shirts and tees, a couple towels, toothbrushes, change of underwear, some Coleman cooking gear, a compass. We must have had a map, but I don’t remember ever looking at it. We didn’t have a plan. One other thing I didn’t have was gloves. Boyfriend had leather cycling gloves, but it was June, summer in my experience and I dressed accordingly.
            It was a pretty straight shot from Columbus to Wheeling, but from there, straight didn’t enter into anybody’s vocabulary. We weren’t in any hurry, got lost plenty of times. Roads, twisted and narrow, veered sharply left, then right. We’d push up a steep rise with no clue of what we’d find on the downside, then feel our hearts leap into our throats as the Suzuki dropped from the knoll. We’d scrape sheered mountainsides for miles, then teeter on unguarded cliffsides into shadowed hollows. The sun was in our eyes in the morning and hidden behind our backs by midafternoon.
            Near dinner time we’d keep our eyes peeled for a campground or a park where we could pitch the tent and barbecue whatever we’d found in a Mom & Pop along the way. On the third day in the mountains, though, from about 4:00 on, the route offered no sheltering places. On the rare occasions when cliffside gave way to a clearing, that clearing would be occupied by a few tired-looking dwellings, no people in sight.
             Finally, in near dark, we came to a side road with a sign for a state park, and so we followed an arrow pointing off to the right. Thunder growled in the distance like a newly awakened bear. A mile in, we could only barely make out a big grassy area with an open pavilion in the middle. Not bothering to pitch the tent or scout out a fire pit, we rolled the sleeping bag out on the pavilion floor and ate peanut butter sandwiches as the wind picked up and the high pine trees moaned.
            In the morning, the jeering alarm of a lone blue jay woke us. The air smelled of new rain and honeysuckle, though the temperature had dropped to about 50. We were sore from sleeping on concrete, hungry, desperate for hot water. The Suzuki needed gas and my cold hands needed gloves.
When, about fifteen miles from the state park we came to a diner, we rejoiced. A clean restroom, hot coffee, lumberjack breakfast. Gas, we learned, could be found just around a corner. And gloves? That took some discussion, but the neighborly diners persisted in finding some way to help. In a kind of eureka! moment, someone reckoned gardening gloves could be bought at a farm & feed store, just up the road about fifty miles. Fifty narrow, twisted, steep and cold miles.       
             We thanked them, left a nice tip, and headed out. All along the way, I now saw signs of domesticity, chimney smoke, laundry hung out to dry, a soccer ball on the grass. Mid-morning, it started to rain, steady and hard, and soon everything was soaked through, including my newly purchased, soft jersey gardening gloves. It didn’t matter one whit. I’d found love on those mountain miles.
 
Now, driving this winding road, the radio on, nothing but heartbreak songs playing, I’m remembering my first time here, first love, discovering so much of living for the first time. I’m feeling not life passing, but the past. The past passing. This feeling is not nostalgia. It’s not regret or anything like that. It’s the infinitude of miles, the up and downness of them, the certainty of heading somewhere and the ambiguity of the destination. It’s the narrow gaps, the need to keep eyes on the road, the awareness of the great blue up above. It’s these mountains as companions, it’s knowing these mountains will still be there, even if love deserts you. This winding road, the road I’m driving on, this road rises into the mountains, then falls in search of a hidden stream, rises and falls, rises and falls with the land, rises and falls, as if the land itself had a pulsing heart.