Lost on the Drive
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Back roads through the Kansas foothills wound us first past the Leavenworth military cemetery and then Lansing Prison, by hills raked with white headstones and haunted with barbed-wire shadows. The narrow streets were overhung with branches, bare, about to bud, and the sunshine covered the hills like a sheet kicked up and spread out on the flowing hills that rose and fell like dinosaur humps. By then, she’d gotten tired in the backseat and had given up on the scenery. She closed her eyes in trust and felt the climbs and the drops as her father drove on.
The road was curvaceous and it towed the car along, the wheels hugged tight along the edges, at times passing over the center line and then back safely into its own lane. We drove past crumpled shacks with front doors that opened to the highway and expansive tobacco farm spreads and cider mills far off the road. She stopped talking and entrusted the driving to me and the truth was that I was lost. I had a general idea about where to go, but nothing more. We were going east toward the interstate, but there were no on or off ramps for miles, just narrow country road dug into the dirt.
Finally we came to an old race track that’d been shut down since the summer before and beyond it was a dead end road underneath the massive supports holding a bridge overpass above train tracks and soybean fields. On the shoulder, a man with hair that had been pulled by a motorcycle helmet and pink cheeks colored by the wind sat with his legs around his bike’s back wheel tooling with bolts near the rear shocks. He watched us turn around at a dead end, in the gravel, and pull by him again. He traced us most of the way down the street back to a turn we’d missed to the highway. He must have wondered how he could choose a work spot at a dead end on a nothing road and still be interrupted.
We followed the highway signs and were back on the interstate with the country hills and the winding curves below us. I was no longer driving blindly, and everything that came along was familiar and not as exciting. She never knew we were lost. She’d asked because she is intuitive, but she never knew for sure.
