Dusty Rose in the Rearview Mirror
Fifteen minutes from my apartment is a stretch of rural highway like a green corridor. It runs between a forested hill and the winding river weaving in and out of view, with the occasional farmhouse and dirt road branching off. The speed limit is 50, but when I drive along this five mile stretch I go somewhere between 40 and 45, because it's so pretty and I want to drive slow enough to see everything. About five miles from where I get on this particular rural highway, there is a historical landmark with a turn-off for parking. I come here, sometimes, when I need to just sit and think, to brainstorm whatever project I'm working on.
It's 8:50 pm. The sun is low, behind the gathering clouds, but not set yet so it's still light enough to read. An early twilight color, the faintest blue filter. The olive brown river flows slowly, just twenty feet away from the turn-off, on the other side of a band of young trees and tall grass. This part of the state is all forested hills with little communities and farmland nestled within, and while the trees between me and the river are young, slender and barely ten feet tall, across the road is the hill covered with older growth, with a dense edge of underbrush hiding the shape of the hill in shadow.
I'm not far from civilization, but it's quiet here, in the way that nature is quiet. The wind is up, shaking the trees, the susurration building and falling like the rush of ocean waves. Rain falls lightly onto the puddle next to my car in the turn-off, the puddle a remnant of yesterday, the rain a portent of the coming storm. Somewhere in the trees a chickadee calls, two-note and lonesome.
It is peaceful. Only one or two cars pass while I'm sitting here, the sound of tires against wet pavement brief as they pass. I can almost believe I'm the only person in the whole world in this moment, listening to the wind, the chickadee, the occasional twig dropping onto my roof as the quavering tree shakes it loose. I wish I could sit here for hours, with the storm coming, and rain pitter-pattering on the puddle, the river, the peaceful noise of nature. I could fall asleep to these sounds. I do fall asleep to these sounds, with an app, to drown out my A/C. But this is different. This is real, and there's something more to it, something that a recording can't capture.
Even though I want to linger, eventually I must return, so I break the spell and drive back through the green corridor, like it's a magic portal back to civilization, five miles long.
As I look back, through my car's side mirror, the sun is finally setting and the clouds are a pale, dusty rose color against the shadowed trees; I really have left some magical place behind.
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