Drivers Diaries

Hope Road

Driving on a Saturday noon learning Spanish from a couple of Scots, I pass a white pony wearing a blue jacket. And sun dances on the Flat River in a late winter thaw while poplar trees cast their grand shadows across the road. There is a pontoon boat anchored on the shore of a watering hole in a field where cows graze.

Here the trees are nomads that stayed in one place too long. The roots grew up through their feet and anchored them, immobile for eternity. As the wind blows, they moan. Longing to be free. Birds nest in their outstretched arms and whisper stories of their travels in the nomad’s ear.

The sun sets on another winter and electric blue clouds look down on the pony in the blue coat, the cows grazing, and the beached pontoon.

The dusk pushes me on through these mid-Michigan towns. Past the husks of rotted old cars that litter the landscape, where there are more abandon homes than chances to live the American dream. All this along the road called Hope.

Drivers Diaries

Martha Stansky stands in the living room of her studio apartment above the liquor store watching T.V. Her left arm is folded across her gentle breasts, bracing her right arm at a ninety-degree angle. A cigarette is perched between the thin fingers of her right hand just inches from her mouth. She stands to watch T.V. in her silk housecoat and curlers because if she sits down something might not get done. If she sits down she might think about things that won’t happen. She will think about the holidays that she won’t celebrate with friends and family that she doesn’t have. She will think about the presents she won’t get for the children she never had. She will think about the life that she never lived. She will wonder how she became a middle-aged short order waitress instead of a powerful lawyer or saintly doctor. Martha Stansky just stands in the one room of her one room apartment above the liquor store smoking and watching T.V.

Drivers Diaries

Hicksville

I’m roaring down M-57 in a head on snowstorm. My stocking cap is drying on the dashboard heater and it fills the cab with the acrid smell of warm wool soaked in sweat. There’s a Styrofoam cup in the console that sloshes a thick black liquid that the Sunoco passes off as coffee. It smells a little like diesel and that’s OK ‘cause it’s hot and it keeps me going.

I’m on my way to the middle of nowhere and I must be just about there ‘cause I passed Podunk road. The sign reads “Podunk Ave.”, but it’s nothing more than a gravel road. Somebody gave it the designation of avenue hoping that it might lend some credibility. As if three little letters, A-V-E, will make Podunk sound better. Anyone who knows Podunk can tell you it just runs north and south through cornfields and backwoods. It doesn’t lead really anywhere. The nearest town is Hicksville and that’s about ten miles north and east.

That stretch of land between Podunk and Hicksville is spotty with farmland and trailer houses that use old cars and home furniture as lawn decorations. There’s one trailer there that has a yard gnome sitting in an old Lay-Z-Boy in front of a console TV. Guess that passes as art for these folks.

Hicksville is a different story altogether. The residents are eager to tell you just how metropolitan their fair town is compared to the outskirts. Their buildings are made of brick, wood, and stone. No cheap aluminum here. They also have the privilege of a library. Though everyone knows that the ladies of the town use it mostly to keep up on Harlequin Romances. Yep, the folks of Hicksville don’t take too kindly to the notion that they are anything like those folks that live between here and Podunk road (Ave.).