Is an intersection my good buddy Gary and I found one winter afternoon driving around on mushrooms with the explicit purpose of expanding our driving boundaries and getting lost somewhere. We had each eaten an eighth of an once inside of a PBJ, and were thoroughly “tripping” as we used to say.
Now, before you judge, let me remind you that mushrooms are more like weed than alcohol when it comes to driving- they’re more on your side than an active disrupter- so even though you might be noticing that every tree lining the road is identical and planted an identical distance apart from one another as though clone stamped by a video game programmer God, and the road itself might look like it stretches about a thousand miles away in the distance in front of you, it actually all works out once things roll into the foreground. It’s like autopilot still works. With alcohol, autopilot- or any pilot, really- does NOT work. Not at all. But with mushrooms- driving is on your side.
I remember we started at our friend’s place, which was as far out in the country as we had been- and after a quick afternoon visit, we continued on in that direction into unfamiliar territory. It was on the visit that we ate our sandwiches. There were a lot of people there, it was a bit of a party house for kids in their late teens early 20s. They had a giant 50 gallon barrel in the front yard that they used to burn their trash in. Two young couples lived there, Dave and Erin- who were, and still are, great- rough around the edges back then, redneck roots, but solid responsible adults now. The other couple was this piece of shit named Herm, who was a small white kid with horrible small dick energy, and his poor abused girlfriend, who he openly disrespected 24/7. We all wondered why she was with him, with how he treated her. I assumed her dad was a similar piece of shit. When we stopped in, everyone mentioned was there, and a handful of “regulars” as well. It was a jolly, dirty, indoor cigarette smoking good time.
The roads beyond into the country were clean and white, in contrast. Fresh countryside. Fresh snow covering. I brought my old Fujica 35mm camera I had loaded with black and white film with me and took a bevy of photos that I enjoy perusing to this day. I have an entire chest that is just full of stacks of black and white photos that I took from high school through my early 20s of friends and scenes. I knew I was giving myself a huge gift at the time, and I was more correct than I imagined in that. I’ll spend one night a year just flipping through it. Time traveling.
One of the photos I have is of a street intersection sign, like you see in residentials. Penfold and Magee road. It was significant, as we found it after several hours of just driving into the deep wilderness in one direction. Out Bear River Road, through the Chandler Hill area, zig zagging through seas of snow drifted farmland and creepy old trailer homesteads smoke signaling their occupancy through their chimneys to the sky. The sign marked the intersection of two tiny, seasonal, dirt roads. Almost two-tracks. The sign, with it’s official “property of the county” aura, seemed so out of place in the absolute Nowhere that it was. The last house we saw before the intersection, I believe, had a second story door to nothing- a death drop- but was probably abandoned anyways.
Tonight the winter howls and my good buddy Gary is nearby and it’s Thanksgiving, when we traditionally get together for games. We talked about it earlier like we intended to. But who has the energy for night traditions at our age. And I remain torn between trying to make the most of the last I’ll see of him “living” here, for the brief time it’s going to last, or getting it over with early and just going back to living like he’s across the universe connected only (but not insignificantly) by the internet.
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