I am behind the wheel because you said you didn’t want to drive in the dark and the only way you would agree to come with me to the neighboring town for a Miyazaki marathon was if I said I would drive us home. You aren’t old yet, you are just nervous about these things. I actually kind of like driving in the dark. There is less traffic; nothing to distract my mind from itself. I can feel truly alone, I can imagine that we are anywhere.
As soon as we hit the highway, I turn the radio to 98.7 FM. It is a steady mix of country music, and I turn, laughing, to sing you a choral line from a song that you hate. But it’s late and you are already asleep, head cradled by the shoulder of your seatbelt. The drive is about two hours. I turn up the music just a little, not enough to wake you.
If it were daylight, we would see rolling hills. Wheat fields and the sharp edge of curves and rises that blew here during the ice-age. Fertile mounds of pulverized stone. The two-lane highway winds between them. I know the road well, I lean into its curves. But I still have to pay attention.
You thought it was a long way to drive just to see a movie. But the town we live in has only one theater that plays bad reruns, and I often miss disappearing in the dark of a cinema, sipping on beers from our pockets. It is winter, but the weather has been wonderful all weekend. Tonight there is crisp air with nothing in it. All dried up. The car says the temperature is hovering just around freezing. The sky is full of stars, and I am remembering just how far away we live from anything.
As I continue, we lose altitude and descend from the plains toward a river canyon. I am speeding along a tributary and I can see that the night is finally conjuring moisture, lapping it up from the water and presenting it to us as pillows and walls of fog. In the quiet, listening to your steady breathing and to the hum of the acoustic radio, I start to think of the things that could go wrong. There are so many deer around here and other animals like racoons that I might stupidly swerve for. There is no cell service, so I wonder what someone would do if they came upon our overturned car. They would have to drive away; they would probably feel reluctant to do so but they would have to leave us to let someone in the next town know what had happened. They would come back, a fleet of emergency vehicles, and put on a show for no one. I think about how I don’t have a blanket in here and if our ancient car finally broke down, how long could we last in the cold?
The list goes on, if you let it, but I don’t.
It is a particular skill of mine, overwhelming my worry. I practice it often.
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I used to be petrified of spiders. The mothers would cocoon felted egg sacs in hidden corners of my bedroom ceiling and when they hatched on summer evenings, I could see the babies’ tiny shadows racing in every direction. I slept most of those nights in the hallway, rolled in a quilt. When I was older, I worked at a summer camp where I was in charge of a cabin-full of squirrelly pre-teen girls. Each week without fail, someone would scream and point to the wood of their bunk at a spider. Furry, dark, settling in for the night in a corner. It was good to rid the cabin of the spider, so I did it. It was one level of good to kill it in secret under a napkin, it was a level better to ferry it outside, unharmed. I watched it quiver on the edge of a paper towel, waited for it to dart towards me. But my hand was steady. It didn’t move until I wanted it to, until I flung its body into the ferns.
I remember when we drove from Minneapolis to Chicago on I-94 and saw a car engulfed in flames on the shoulder of the highway. How I felt the faint heat of it on the passenger side window glass and leaned in. You slowed down and we remarked in confusion. There were no cops, no ambulances. Should we stop? But the thing was already incinerated. I could see the metal skeleton of the driver’s seat through flame. If there had been flesh there once, it was gone now. The effect of this scene lasted about a week: being afraid of cars. I took the bus. I walked to the grocery store and back carrying about six plastic bags. Their handles dug into the creases of my fingers and hurt.
I wonder how many warnings like this we get. Slow down. It might as well have been you. The answer is probably an impossibility. The answer is probably, sometimes, none.
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Your face is calm and soft, each muscle slack and trusting: itself. I’ve turned the radio off and now all I can hear is the rush of air that makes music through the rubber seal of the sunroof when we reach somewhere around 72mph. The bends in the road are gentle, and I’ve set the cruise control so I can plant both of my feet firmly on the floor. The world outside is a single tunnel of headlights, falling away to either side in oceanic black. It is the kind of darkness that reflects – even the dash light is enough so that all I see is my own face when I focus on the inside of the windshield. Things outside are illuminated for only a second before they pass. We get very little warning. Bump, Dip, Steep Grade, Left Turn, Deer. Every few minutes, a shrew or a tumbleweed darts into the road, hesitates, changes direction and picks a side. Slow down. It might as well have been you.
I think about the time we drove by a family of deer on our way to a camping trip. They were so well camouflaged, almost unmoving, and we didn’t spot them until we were quite close. My choice was to brake or to keep driving. In the end, I sped up to hurry by and you thought that was reckless and stupid. You refused to talk to me for the rest of the drive. I maintained my innocence; I’d been taught that the dangers of swerving or slowing down without warning are greater than the alternative. The deer stayed where they were, might have glanced up at us from their brunch. We made it safely. I didn’t feel like I had to apologize.
In the tent that night we listened together to the creaks and moans of the forest and its inhabitants as they shuffled around us. You told me that you worried because somebody had to. In fact, you felt burdened by more than your fair share of it. There was an allotted amount of boldness, doled out for each couple, each family, each loving person who doesn’t want to lose what they have, and I consistently used it all up. To eschew fear with limited resources is the challenge. I waited until morning to tell you that sometimes I wished I could express my fears and I feel like there was no worry left. We couldn’t get the balance right.
Maybe worry is the wrong word. Maybe it is more generous or fair to speak of caution and care. We follow the rise and fall of the inland dunes. I turn the radio back on, and a man’s voice is advertising a steakhouse 40 miles from here. I press the seek button and the numbers fly by and finally settle on the only other signal. It’s a Greg Brown song I know from my childhood. We used to say we could walk all night. The music is all bongos, harmonica and fiddle. Now we say, ‘I could walk all night,’ but it’s not true.An uncle of mine used to bring his guitar and sing it at family gatherings. Hey, hey, hey, hey who woulda thunk it.
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The car is accelerating, and the visibility is shrinking. It feels almost like we are moving not at all, like walls on either side of us are inching close. I wonder what you would say if you woke up now. I reach to turn on the fog lights and accidentally turn the headlights off completely. It is a startling black. I sink into the feeling of hurtling through space, of nothingness and speed. My whole life I have made and remade my commitment to not being crippled by concern, nor changed by it.
After about five seconds, I turn the lights back on. You are still sleeping. Isn’t this what we both want? To wrangle fear in any way possible, to be as free as we can? Your mouth is open just a little bit; your jaw is pulled toward your shoulder by gravity. I can’t hear the breath in, but when you breathe out it is in a sighing puff, like letting just enough air out of a balloon so that it can be tied.
In this way we drive almost the whole way home. The fog lifts imperceptibly before it gathers again and smothers us. We have yet to pass by another car. I think of what you said to me after the deer incident: maybe I have been too lucky, and I am courting a reason to be afraid. At home I drink the expired milk to prove a point; the dates are meaningless, arbitrary. I let yellowjackets crawl on my dinner plate and I leave the door unlocked at night. Maybe it will always be like this; you from the protestant cold of the Midwest and me from the temperate ease of the pioneering West.
Finally, you lift your head and smack your lips together, wipe the side of your chin with your sleeve. We have risen to the top of a glen and left the fog behind us in the sunken grade. I peer at it in the rearview mirror until it disappears. We are back under a milky dome of stars. You admire them out the window, just beyond the specter of your own face. I’m looking at the reflection wondering if I should tell you about the fog, about how hard it was to see, that I was scared. You sit upright, you are apparently done with your nap. You turn up the music. It is a song we both know.We are almost home.