02/22/2010

I had to drive back from Missouri yesterday, and I was worried about the weather (which became pretty inclement later). I had planned to leave no later than 7am, which is much earlier for me than it is for the rest of the world. The weather was supposed to close in sometime that morning, and after it took me 8 hours instead of the usual 6 on Friday.

So it wasn’t really too much of an inconvenience when my brother Danny’s phone wouldn’t stop making noise at 5:30, and I couldn’t find it buried in a pile of clothes after much angry searching. Eventually he was roused from his sleep and turned it off, but the bonds of sleep had escaped me for the morning.

I tossed and turned for a while, prohibited from getting any further rest by Danny’s snoring. He snores like a freight train. I debated for a moment yelling at him or trying to push him over into another direction, but instead I thought, “you know what? I’ll just go.”

I’m very glad I didn’t turn angry with him. In the end I would have made it back here just the same, tired or not. And he would have felt bad for keeping me awake. Better he didn’t know I guess. I closed the hotel room door as silently as I could, probably spending 10 seconds on the task. I know when he wakes I’ll be almost back to minneapolis. Rest easy.

I barely remember staggering through the hotel room we shared in the town where I went to college, extreme northwestern Missouri. The drive would have me tracking north and east across southwestern iowa to find the interstate. It’s still pitch black when I leave, the parking lot coated in ice, my and my rolling suitcase skating across to my car – newly repaired. It still protests at starting.

I pump gas in the black bitter cold, in front of a gas station that’s closed. I get a coffee to go from McDonald’s. Only there under the generic corporate arch are there any humans to be seen. They’re overweight, big-haired, speaking accents now strange to me, friendly, smiling, small-town people.

I pass Pickering, Missouri. I had just been told by a native the night before that it says “Welcome to Pickering” on both sides of the sign – it’s that small. He was right.

The sun started to come up around Bedford, Iowa, a little passing-through for me on the way home, but lots of people’s hometown. There’s a feed store, a frozen church. A minature Hy-Vee grocery. There was still no one to be seen at this hour. Everyone’s in bed in Bedford. An hour and a half or more on two lane, middle of nowhere highways before there showed only a small handfull of other cars, mostly monstrous trucks going in the other direction, away from the morning. Not a single one headed in the same direction as me, to the overcast east.

Nothing occupies the landscape there. It was all frozen, like a minuature car driving around in a freezer case, everything was coated and encrusted in grey, but everything was only some trees, bushes, and fenceposts, with the occasional odd object I’m too bleary to make much notice of. I am blind with sleep, heightened by the unknown of glazed roads, frayed by tireness. I’m puffed in my thick winter coat driving, holding my hand over the steam

I glance at every house without seeing a single light burning. No one is awake in Bedford.