Drove up to Connecticut on Wednesday morning and back Thursday morning—about 1200 miles in 36 hours, all to celebrate brother John’s birthday. It was supposed to be the two days before, but snow all up and down the east coast put the kibosh on that. I enjoyed insanely good Portuguese food, decent wine (like I’d really know one way or the other), outstanding conversation and, in the car, sixteen hours of brilliant music. My ears are ringing, my back hurts and I'm exhausted—five hours sleep the night before the trip, four and a half hours at Johnny's, and about six hours last night. I’m a tarred boy. There are worse things.
One neat side effect of the trip being delayed by snow storms was how gorgeous the drive was made. I went up I-81 for about 330 miles of the drive which, if you don’t know, goes through the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The interstate also passes through West Virginia and Maryland (for about ten miles), of course, but those states aren’t mountainous at that point. The roads were cleared of snow and bone-dry, but the mountains on either side were snow-frosted and just bizarrely gorgeous. Blue skies with fluffy white clouds and no traffic made for a marvelously pleasant driving experience.
John routed me through the Torrington/Barkhamsted/Winsted area in northwestern Connecticut, so as to avoid Hartford traffic. That was an area I’d driven in quite a bit with pal Karen back in high school and college. We never had any reason to go there, really, we’d just drive around and sort of see if we could get lost and find our way back. It’s extremely rural, by and large, hilly verging on mountainous, and simply beautiful. Since our exploring was haphazard and aimless, however, we (or at least I) got to know the area but not in any systematic way, so I’d frequently be surprised to find myself somewhere I knew well but with no idea of how I’d gotten there.
Driving those roads again after fifteen or twenty years was a pleasant but strange and disconcerting experience. I’d suddenly find myself someplace I knew quite well—and it’s pleasantly shocking how little most of it had changed—but with no idea of how THIS place I know well connects to THAT place I know well. I’d get flashes suddenly, images or memories and realized I’d eaten at that place when I was going door-to-door for ConnPIRG back in college, telling folks about the pollution in their local rivers and why they should give me money to fight the good fight. And I knew I’d spent the next five or six hours walking those roads but I had no idea where those roads were or what they looked like. As I drove over the Barkhamsted reservoir, I knew I’d gone to the beach there a couple times but had no idea where it was in relation to my current location—no idea where we parked or what the beach really looked like, just that I’d gone. It was as if someone said a line from a movie and I could quote the next three lines but had no idea what movie those lines came from, when it was made, who starred in it or even what the plot was.
At one point on the way back down, somewhere around the Front Royal area of Virginia, I think, you come up on this one section of what I believe are the Blue Ridge Mountains where you’re sort of looking straight at the range from the tippy top of it, so you can see both the western and eastern faces as they stretch away from you for a few dozen or hundred miles. It’s an odd and initially confusing perspective, but just gorgeous. And there’s something about that part of the Blue Ridge for the next twenty or so miles that’s really rough-hewn and jagged and gives you such a clear idea of the violence that must have been done by the receding glaciers—you can really see how they just ripped huge chunks out of the mountainsides. Just one more reminder, in case you’d gotten complacent, of why it’s a bad idea to take on a glacier.
You are a good brother.
Posted by: Susan | Saturday, March 05, 2005 at 05:49 PM