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.

Lessons in Lunacy

I was taking a night class.  The classroom was full of chattering students, but only half of it was lit, seeming to signify the lateness of the hour.  There was no teacher there to instruct us.  Instead, a tall cart bearing an old television had been wheeled into the room by some unknown person and set up by the chalk board under the lit portion of the room.  On the television there was a black and white image of a man in a lab coat wearing horn rimmed glasses.  He was giving a lecture about the moon, which barely anyone was paying attention to.  But at one point he paused in his lecture and lifted his right hand and pointed his finger upwards, as if to indicate something above the frame of the TV.  He had a smirk on his face as he did this, as though he were divulging some wicked secret.  Everyone followed the direction of his finger and looked up towards the ceiling of the classroom.  There we could see the moon in the sky above us, glowing unbearably huge and full as though it were only a few feet away, every crater, crack, and crevice sharp and clear.

This sight caused a stir among the students that threatened to break out into pockets of full blown hysteria.  But one girl in a brown sweater, who I recognized as the top student in the class, stood up and managed to restore order.  She proposed that we all go down to the administration office and complain about this outrage.  None of us were sure what the administration office was supposed to do, or even quite what the nature of the problem was, but it seemed to be as reasonable a course of action as any other.  We rallied behind this girl and we all marched out as a group into the hall behind her.

The lights were on throughout the school, but all of the other classrooms were deserted.  There were papers and notebooks strewn about the floors in the classrooms and the hallways, giving the impression that everyone had just up and fled the building in a tremendous hurry.  As we navigated the hallways, I made my way up to the front of the group next to the girl in the brown sweater.  I tried to ask her exactly what the plan was, but she stared resolutely ahead, determined to give the administration office a piece of her mind.  She barreled ahead, bent towards her goal.

But then we came to an impasse.  The hallway we were following suddenly came to a dead end and we were confronted with a bank of vending machines.  The girl just nodded and scrunched her nose at this.  She turned back to the group and told us that this wouldn't be a problem.  She said that a certain combination of coins placed in each machine would cause them to slide apart and reveal a secret passage behind them.  She collected all the spare change from the class.  Everyone counted the coins out in their palms and then passed them forward.  We put thirty five cents in one machine and sixty five in the other, and they pulled back and swung open like a set of secret doors, just as the girl had promised.

The passageway behind the machines was dark and impenetrable.  The class hesitated go on, but the girl stirred them all to action just as she had before, and everyone followed her into the darkness.  We stumbled around a bit, but there was a light from the open door of a room somewhere up ahead, drawing us all forward.  We crowded in the doorway of this room, the girl at the head of the group and a few people behind her, straining to see over her shoulders.  The room was set up like a studio of some sort.  There were maps and charts of the planets on the walls, and in the middle of the room there was a television camera.  There was a mannequin set up in front of this camera.  It was only the upper torso of the mannequin, supported on a brass pole.  It was dressed in a lab coat and horned rimmed glasses, and we could see that it was the same man that had been on the television back in the classroom.  It still had that same smirk carefully painted on its face, and its finger was still pointing skyward.  The significance of this pointed finger suddenly dawned on me, and I turned to warn the rest of the class, but it was too late.  I could already see their eyes drifting upwards.

My Private Junkyard

Every car that I had ever owned was parked in my driveway.  I kept having to pull them out and rearrange them, trying to get them all to fit, getting entangled with the busy traffic out on the street in front of the house.  I had to get behind the wheel of each car one by one and find the right key on my key chain and start them up, some of them having sat for years collecting dirt and dry leaves.  They carried different scents from different seasons in my life, forgotten debris, scraps of paper stuffed into the seats, all of them dense with memories.  I got to where I almost forgot when and where I was, looking out the dirty windshield on some hazy Friday afternoon of time itself, cars gridlocked everywhere. 

I ended up pulling some of the cars into the fenced in back yard.  I knew that the tires would tear up the grass and wear muddy ruts into the ground, but I wanted to keep them all, now that they'd come into my possession again, now that they'd all been so vividly recalled.  I got them all to fit to where I could close the wooden gate and lock them in.  It took me hours.  I was sweating from the effort and my t-shirt was dirty from climbing in and out of the vehicles.  I went in to take a shower and I glanced down from the upstairs window, and I could see all the cars packed in tight around the house.