New Hope Road Revisited

Saturday was the kind of day in the country I long for, but rarely experience. There was this mysterious convergence of feelings and sensations while in the car driving, windows down, fresh air blowing in. You know those nice reveries and daydreams you have in summer somtimes? Maybe at the beach, or the lake on vacation. Or at the park on a Sunday afternoon. The countryside was spread out before me. A road traveled countless times. I was so relaxed. Anxiety, rushing, hurriedness. It was all gone. It was very subtle, this mood or state of mind, whatever it was, but I was on the verge of something profound. You can sense it, even if you don’t know what it is. It’s there, and yet it always wants to elude your grasp. That’s how I felt.

Sights, sounds and mysterious little intuitions drifted by and away from me, outside the car windows and within my thoughts, as I drove that quiet back road connecting the Interstate with the old Charleston Highway. I saw the expected sights: the abandoned general mercantile store; pine trees and thick woods crowding close to the road; the dried up creeks after four years of drought; the sign for the deep-well drilling company, likely doing extraordinary business these days; the beginning and end of the New Hope community; the houses, farms, barns and pastures, nestled along this winding road, this little oasis only a short distance from the madness I left behind on the interstate. I found myself once again light years from the screaming trucks and blazing SUVs zinging past me earlier before I turned off and found sanctuary. This road, this highway that straddles two worlds.

And the skies! Oh, what clear blue tints and startlingly sharp and vivid clouds. It was one of those days when the air seemed as clean and fresh as an afternoon rainshower. Into this tableaux, the sun cast a warm and mellow light that had the slanting edge of late September in it. Landscape and skies were bathed in a hyper-real luminosity, painterly almost, dreamed up, too real, inspiration for artists and writers.

I had the windows down, my arm oustretched to catch the wind. I kept thinking I was having these rather remarkable feelings of well-being. But why? Was it just a passing figment of my imagination, called forth by a drive in the country on a beautiful day?

I passed more fields and farms, houses and rolled bundles of hay, barbed wire fences with weeds, grasses, and plants about to turn brown and gold in the first days of impending autumn.

Only with the windows down do I hear the crickets and insect sounds in the woods that tell me the earth is alive with unseen creatures. Overhead, and in front of my car, little yellow butterflies dance on tiny pockets of warm air rising from the pavement.

Everything is so lovely. The air, I have to say again, is so fresh. The clouds are so close. The miles slip past as I sit rather transfixed in the driver’s seat, wondering when the exact moment will arrive when the final barn and silo show up on the left, remnants of a larger farm now being consumed by undergrowth and kudzu, slowly, until it’s just a pile of debris in a mound of green, one day a few years hence.

But then, just then, a large clearing appears and I see the AME church on the left. Today there is a funeral, and a black hearse is out front and people are standing and waiting on this most splendid and glorious blue-sky day. There is no trace of anything somber or sad, really, except the two big black cars and a moment when gravity seems suddenly close about me, for just a few seconds, and I am, for the briefest time, caught off guard by another person’s death on a day when life has no limits and mortality seems as light and fanciful as little yellow butterflies crossing the road ahead and in the distance, everywhere.

And the crickets sang their farewell song, and the sky was like a dream, and the new road I was on stretched out ahead in a straight line in the direction of my destination.

(Originally posted at Open Diary, Sept. 21, 2002)