I take my morning commute in 10 degree silence.
My truck has remote start, but I don’t use it anymore. I just put my winter work armor on and hop in. Enjoy that stiff, dimming-service-lights molasses chug that is a frozen vehicle start. Hit the wiper blades to see if they’re frozen in place or if they can throw some snow. As soon as I have at least a submarine’s portal to look through, off I go letting the potholes shake the rest of the snow off my vehicle.
From there it’s a 20 minute C shaped drive around the bay to my mon/weds/fri morning meeting with the boys, or straight to the job site- wherever it might be. I do my clearest thinking in those commuting minutes, even before the 10 minute mark when a noticeable warmth begins to seep into the cab at long last.
Through most of the drive I can look left across the vast ice dessert that is the frozen lake, all the way to the horizon, and observe the sun bringing everything in the world to life. Every February morning sunrise feels like the first time I’ve used my eyes, a little bit. Those moments just after the subconscious has put issues to rest during REM sleep, and just before the day’s challenges and stresses and unpredictable events fill it with new issues to crunch.
For a minute there, everything is just as it is- unjaded by my own troubles or pain or subjective meaning or even my lack thereof. Life is quite beautiful on its own terms. Every little curve and angle to it. Tough getting away from ourselves to see it, but it does happen here and there. Moments of good health, or just after the morphine kicks in. When the brutal distraction of being alive doesn’t interfere with our observation of it.
Hold your left hand in front of you like you’re Jesus Christ demanding that the traffic coming at you halt. Now look at the tip of your pinky on that hand- that’s Michigan, the Mitten State, and the tip of your pinky is where I grew up. Protected from both the north and the west by an impenetrable wall of water. To the east it’s unpopulated wilderness and then another wall of water. And to the south, more wilderness- and then a steadily increasing-in-size series of cities, until you arrive to about the middle of the hand- Flint, Detroit- when you start getting into areas of the state that for the first time do not feel safe. The cities between act like filters, catching the urban criminal types that might wander northwards and away from the central cesspool that doesn’t help them, but keeps them around and alive enough to allow them to help themselves at the expense of other people via theft.
I always feel protected by that wall of water living here, somehow, for some reason. There is something about being in a place where threats could come from any direction that I always found unsettling everywhere else in the world. Like being in a dark mist of sorts with nothing to stop the evil tumbleweeds that are blowing across society from smacking me in the face one unlucky night.
Loading comments...