By Mark Kneeskern
A giant hand is pushing sideways against our truck, rocking her back and forth like a toy boat. We tack south on 385, then bear west on 96 through Chivington and Eads, Heath and Sugar City, gaining hard-fought ground, inch-by-inch.
Recently, I wrote an epic song in homage to the wind and its nebulous ways, attempting to salve some emotional wounds that had been inflicted upon the small desert community of Terlingua during a long, chilly, brutal winter in Far West Texas. Now, as my partner Shannon and I navigate our way toward Salida after visiting my family in Minnesota, the wind is making a genuine attempt to blast us off the road.
Someone more superstitious than myself would believe that spirits, be they malevolent or peaceful, are rising up in reaction to my soliloquy, but I reckon it’s just an exceptionally blustery spring session out here on the plains. Several semis have blown over on the interstate, hopeless sails flattened across a heartless sea of wheat. My own heart has fallen upon the knowledge that my father may soon be riding somewhere on a cosmic zephyr, passing beyond this earthly domain.
Last night we slept in a field of mud. After driving out of Minnesota through a mourning snowstorm, traversing the endless gray skies of Iowa, and crossing dark corners of Missouri and Nebraska, we ran out of steam, entering a state known for wild wind, home of the twister which took little Dorothy to another dimension. I piloted our rig into a field entrance off a wet gravel road, feeling the tires roll into what can only be described as “lumpy pudding.” After a long day of driving on tar-striped highways, we were fixing to collapse, so I just took a deep breath, got out, and slogged around in the mud, (which soon formed thick waffles on the bottoms of my shoes) schlepping our tarp, futon and bedding back and forth from the truck to a nest I’d made from a perfectly random pile of straw which someone had left behind. Waddling around like an obscure and confused goose, I was soon tired almost to the point of collapse. Gus, our feline sidekick, hopped out of the truck to investigate the situation, only to begin walking almost as comically as I, confounded by the sticky, clay-infused surface, stepping forward with two paws while violently shaking the others. Soon, he was observing my baffling behavior from the roof of the truck. (Muddy prints adorn our hood and windshield.) From a nearby woodland came the insane screechings and howlings of local fauna … owls, raccoons, and who-knows-what, all sounding like they might come out from the trees to tear off our faces. I slip-slopped over to the truck, grabbed Gus, and threw him back inside.
In an attempt to make maneuvers less clumpy, I had begun tossing extra straw, making a path from the truck to our muck-bound mattress. With feet weighing fifty pounds each, the straw served only to festoon my mud-waffles with a thatch of absurd yellow whiskers; however, it would serve as a pretty path for a particular princess, one who had been waiting inside the truck. My own movements began to resemble those of a man attempting to escape a mob-murder while already wearing his cement-galoshes.
We finally settled in for the night, fairly comfortable even with icy breezes puffing across our pad. As we spoke in low tones about all of the interesting things we’d witnessed thus far on our journey, the clouds parted for a moment above our heads. There, perfectly framed by cotton, was the Big Dipper. A person confident in the miraculous would take it as a sign that our cup would soon be filled, our luck restored and our garden watered. For a moment, a beautiful one, I believed in magic. Then it began to rain …
I drive now in a somnolent state of mind after a cruel night in that cold Kansas mud. Tumbleweeds migrate across the road and lodge themselves in a fence line on the opposite side, accumulating in such numbers that the fence has become one long, shaggy barrier. Some of those roly-poly Russian thistles catch enough air that they snag upon old railroad powerlines, stacking up like the beads of a nasty abacus, counting off some unknown quantity of troubles.
“High Winds May Exist,” a sign says, making me laugh and breaking my melancholy. The message makes me think about how it’s not always windy here. If there never had been wind, would one really believe that it could exist? We cannot know something until we ourselves have experienced it, and therefore can only take note from the signs and try to best ready ourselves for the adventure. This heartens me as we blow down the road toward our mountain paradise.
Mark Kneeskern has taken to the road, the sky and the ether in an attempt to smash his way into the genre of travel writing.
