Exit Ramp

I was probably about four or five years old, riding in the back seat of a station wagon on a long trip.  It was late in the afternoon in the middle of summer and we were headed north across three contiguous states out west somewhere.  We were caught in holiday traffic, cars bumper to bumper, blaring their horns on all sides.  I had cousins next to me on the seat and more cousins in the back, all of them yelling and and grabbing and fighting and bouncing around on the upholstery.  I was keeping to myself, scribbling in a coloring book in the middle of all this heat and noise under the glaring sun.

As we inched along, I could see that the highway passed under a bridge up ahead, and there was an exit ramp there to get off the freeway.  No one seemed to be getting off at this ramp, but I had an urge to see what was off the exit.  As though prompted by my curiosity, I found myself propelled forward, flying free at the speed of sight. Off the ramp there was just a little local gas station there with the old ticking numbers on the pumps and an attendant that stared out from a dirty window as the traffic passed on the highway all day.  I slipped along the vacant roads of the little town.  It was sad and quiet so late in the day.  I came to crossroads after crossroads with nothing but posts and tufts of grass.  A few pickup trucks rattled by.  People lived around here and they were headed home and the world was so unbearably big and lonely.

I got turned around in a gravel lot somewhere that was decorated with strands of colored flags fluttering in the breeze like they were having a sale, but the lot was empty and the building there was boarded up and there was no one around selling anything.  I felt lost to myself, disembodied and haunting my way along these back roads.  I wanted to cry.  I wanted my coloring book.  I wanted my place in the seat in the middle of all the jumping cousins.  And then I came to another crossroads, and I took another turn, and I found myself back on the bridge that passed over the highway, and I could see all the gridlocked cars stretching out of sight in either direction.

On the Borderline

My brother was staying at a hotel to the east of here on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania.  I went to see him one night and I sat in a chair pulled away from the table and we talked and watched TV and drank from the mini-fridge.  When the sun was just coming up in the morning, I could see that the place was right on the lake.  From the window I could see across the parking-lot to the metal railing where the land dropped off at the ridge and the seagulls circled in the clear sky.  I could see people getting up and heading out to their cars under the shadows of strange trees, maybe something tropical, maybe just elms.  It was hard to tell in the dim light.  I decided that this was where I wanted my wife and I to come before we moved.  This is where I wanted us to spend our last few days in Ohio.  The place just had that perfect feeling, like you were on your way somewhere, like you had left all your troubles behind and you had nothing but the birds and the clear blue sky ahead of you.  It was a way station, unburdened and free.

The Good Book

On a neglected shelf in the back of a store, I spotted a thick book with an unpolished wooden cover and a black silk bookmark hanging from the middle of its pages.  I thought that the book was an empty journal, and I was already coming up with thoughts and schemes to fill it with as I brushed past a large woman who stood rooted in place between me and the shelf.  But when I got to the book and picked it up, I was disappointed to discover that its pages were already filled, printed in a rough typeface that filled every page with no room for margins and no breaks for paragraphs, not even spaces between the words.  I couldn't make out what any of it said.  It just looked like random letters stamped to the paper with ink and madness.

 

But then I looked back at the woman that had blocked my way.  She was dressed in her Sunday best, a dress of blue with white polka dots and a pair of long white satin gloves.  And there were men standing behind the shelf where I had found the book.  They wore suits and their grey beards were trimmed and their hair was combed back.  They all stood still and they all faced towards the front of the store like they were listening to someone, and it was then that I finally heard the preacher speaking from far in the front.  I flipped again through the book and realized now that it was a Bible, printed by the unskilled hands of an amateur on some backwoods home press.  This amateur had probably even cut down the tree that had provided the wood for the cover.  I looked around, wanting to slip out.  But I had the book in my hand now.  I couldn't seem to put it down.  I couldn't seem to leave.  They had drawn me back into religion.