Time for another GRACK!, and this one’s an oldie from November, 2004. Today’s Digital Potlatch offering is the first installment of four-part series that ran inside the framework of my weekly Web column. At the time I wrote this, my wife and I had been living apart for over a year — we did spend Christmas together — and this is the story of my first trip up to Dubuque, Iowa to visit her there. I hadn’t seen the house she was renting and didn’t know much at all about her life in Dubuque. As you can imagine, this was a rather stressful time.
I found this piece while looking through some old columns to find one to post and started reading it again. It still cuts awfully close to the bone. I don’t know what I’m getting into here to republish it, but it describes some special feelings. If I have the nerve, I’ll put the rest up soon so we can all follow the series without losing the thread. This one is long, too, so you’ll want to click through to get it all. Onward!
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Run to Ground, Part I
It was time for a road trip. For the last couple of years, I really hadn’t gone anywhere. My honey was in Dubuque, our separate quests lasting over a year now, and I desperately wanted to see her again. The little house on Harvard Street was a mystery to me, as were the sidewalks and the streets she put her feet on every day. I had to see. I had to go. I had to get away.
She’d urged me to fly, but I wanted contact with my surroundings. From the cab of my ’87 Ford F-150, I’d be connected. I could take any route I chose, stop any time I wanted. The shortest way from New Mexico to the Mississippi River was up through eastern Colorado, then all the way across Nebraska and Iowa on Interstate 80. We’d gone this way before, and I loved the two-lane roads that led from here to the corner of Colorado. On those earlier trips north, I felt sad every time I got to Brush and pulled onto the Interstate, as if something quiet and faraway had just turned ill and died. This time though, as I blasted through an early snowstorm leaving Taos County, a plan was forming in my mind.
It was an unusual day. Always almost empty, the roads in Colorado seemed even more so in the snow and mist. I remembered each lonely ranchhouse I saw along the way. One of them, close by the highway, I called the “gay cowboy” place, because of purple curtains I first noticed years before. I peered at the windows as I went passing by: yep, still there, but faded pale to almost white. North of Limon I had my first glimpse of blue sky, and that was welcome. Because of the earlier snow, I hadn’t stopped to mess around along the way — can’t take pictures in the slop, after all. As a result, I knew I’d reach Nebraska long before I’d planned to stop, but sometimes that’s okay too. This was my trip, after all. The journey was important, maybe more so than I knew. I had to leave some room to be surprised.
In the motel at Ogallala, I opened the Rand-McNally and pondered. I saw that by leaving the Interstate at Grand Island, I could make my way northeast and cross the Missouri River at Decatur. The river was special, I felt. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I’d never actually seen it, having always rocketed across at Omaha with umpteen lanes of rush-hour traffic. So yes, by damn, I’d take a different path this time. And on the Iowa side, I realized, I could follow the Maple river up to State Road 175, which led almost exactly due east to just a few miles south of Waterloo. From there to Dubuque was a 90-mile run of four-lane, and it would be dark then anyway. Perfect! Or was it? What if the back roads took too long? What if I became exhausted or broke down? What if, what if…
I had no idea what the roads were actually like. I knew I’d have to grab the atlas at every jog and detour to figure out which way to go. But Interstate 80 was a given. I knew each rest area and aggravation. The name of the movie was “Dances with Semis” and I’d seen it half a dozen times. I thought about my late father-in-law, who’d grown up in just the kind of Nebraska and Iowa settings I’d be going through if I chose to go that way. Well, hell: I might never come this way again, I realized. I could die tomorrow, the earth might crack, or God forbid, my marriage fade away. I’d take the back roads then, for me, and also for him. I’d do it for Jack.
My early stop gave me the chance to turn in early, and i woke up fresh a little after 5:00 a.m. As I fumbled with the air hose in the chilly pre-dawn air at the truck stop next to the motel, a cattle truck pulled up to take on diesel. It was fully loaded and had probably just done so, as the cows were literally screaming. I’ll never forget that sound. I’ve heard them moo and bawl from parked rigs outside of cafes and gas stations before, but that was nothing. These animals were terrified and showed it. (Hamburger, anyone?)
The truck ran strongly toward Grand Island as the light grew in the east. With the engine fully warmed, a welcome blast of heat rolled over my feet and felt good on my hands. I had coffee, and fruit salad in a styrofoam cup from the “continental breakfast” back in Ogallala. There’s something almost holy about driving this time of morning, I thought, and didn’t want the sun to rise. it did, of course, and I turned off the freeway, hoping for an affirmation the fast food strip south of Grand Island didn’t provide. Only when I picked a road at random and turned northeast did I know the gods were with me: “Henry Fonda Memorial Highway,” the sign said. Somewhere, Jack was smiling, and I was soon all by myself on a long straight two-lane heading for whatever was over the hill.
What there was, was another hill. And another, and another. Nebraska was downright awe-inspiring away from the Platte, I decided. Every rise I topped led to an even higher one, each with a farmhouse tucked beside an evergreen windbreak. There was otherwise not a tree in sight, only corn. Miles and miles and miles of dry brown cornstalks, waiting to be harvested. More corn than anyone could ever use, corn to feed the cows that I’d heard screaming in the dark. It was just too much. For the first time ever in the American Midwest, I felt a deep sense of imbalance as I realized that nothing I was looking at was natural. Rural, yes, isolated, yes, but all manmade. Besides the disquieting homogeneity, something else made me uneasy in a way I don’t remember feeling any time before: all that land was chemically fertilized, of course. I passed a beautiful stream in a quiet valley between two hills, but after I’d shot by, I realized that the water was opaque and green. Nitrogen, all right, too much nitrogen, nitrogen out the damn wazoo.
I shuddered at the thought of what must be coming out of faucets and began to watch the roadsides much more carefully. Here and there were places along the shoulder where the October grass was way too green, all blotchy and uneven. The vegetation along the ditches seemed odd somehow, mutated or suppressed. It was as if I were experiencing the distress of an entire vast ecosystem reflected in my own emotions. For years I’d driven past such scenes and never felt this way. What had changed in me, I wondered?
And yet, I knew I’d done the right thing, heading for the country. The peace of relieving myself at a public restroom in an empty village park made up for all the harried, smelly highway “rest area” stops I’d ever made in my entire life. Pulling up to the take-out window at a small McDonald’s for a sausage biscuit in a quiet Nebraska town with wide, open streets on a Thursday morning was a joy: no traffic at all, no horns, no bustle. Just me and a friendly lady with extra pennies for the tax. On the way out of wherever this was, I saw a pickup truck with three old men in the front seat heading slowly down a wooded lane beside a cornfield. Off to shoot some doves, I figured, or just to find a quiet spot to pass the whiskey. This is how it ought to be for old men everywhere, I knew. A few years more, and there I’d be if I were luckier than most. (You don’t find this in the suburbs, and marketers can’t sell it.) The poignancy came near to felling me on the spot, in fact, so I toasted Jack, myself, and the eternal mysteries with tequila from my flask.
That’s me, it’s true, I really did it. But it was after 10:00 a.m., and I hadn’t even crossed the river yet, or found it. There were at least 450 miles to go, and I had a flash of doubt, though only for a moment. Over-fertilized or not, the land was spacious and exciting, and red-tailed hawks sat perched on telephone poles. Here and there were little patches of heaven, islands of home and horticulture. Despite the things that bothered me, I felt at home on the long back roads where I could go as fast as on any Interstate, yet still smell damp earth and watch leaves fall.
The sun was shining, the Missouri River and Iowa lay ahead. I brushed the biscuit crumbs off my lap and pushed the Ford to cruising speed. To be in this place, right now, alone and having an adventure, was as close to heaven as I could get, and I felt better than I had in years.
[To go directly to Part II, click here.]
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This is beautiful, John.
Well damn, Larry. Thank you mucho.
That’s one of my favorite pics of Hobbs. Love the contrasting colors of the geraniums…..and Hobbs looks so noble.
He was one helluva cat. Looking noble was about his only trick, but he did it well.
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