July 10, 2010
Saturday

With each step, I move farther
into the future wondering.
How will I ever leave all this?
How? How does one ever leave?
               — Elizabeth Spires, b. 1952
                   American poet

I should add a new category: Emotion Recollected in Tranquility. The date on this post is July 10, the day I left home for Part I of the Double Shot Summer, but it’s being written a little more than a week after that first step. And I have to recollect the emotion entirely from memory, because my notebook is little help. “6:30 — 73 degrees — raining. The coffee is perfect.” That’s all I wrote that day. I think I had my two cups of coffee just looking out at the much loved backyard vista that I would be leaving for a little more than two weeks, gathered up the last things that ever get gathered (my notebook, my computer, my little statue of the woman at the well and the other anchoring objects I carry when I can), and was on my way by 8:00.

My first destination was Clayton, Georgia, the town just south of the Hambidge Artist Residency where I spent part of March and April of 2009. Back then I split the trip into two parts, stopping in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and continuing on the two or three hours to Rabun Gap, Georgia the next day. This time I needed to make Clayton in one swoop.

I’m a pretty good Gallivanter. I feel OK after about 400 miles, fade by 500. The 615 miles all at once to Clayton was a challenge. At a rest stop somewhere in Virginia the trip almost came to a complete standstill when an SUV started backing out directly into my path. I leaned on the horn and I think it stopped only inches from my front grille. Somewhere in North Carolina my eyes started to burn and itch, and after about five minutes, the right eye was swollen shut and the left eye was red-rimmed and scratchy. I pulled over, used what was left of my drinking water to wash my eyes, and rested for about twenty minutes.

I stopped for gas not long after that. How could there still be three hours left? I’d put a box of CDs in the car without looking very carefully at what was in it. I listened to Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony, an early work I don’t know well and that I found not very interesting until the singing part at the end, which I normally do not like. I listened to the Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 album After Bathing at Baxter’s, and though I still love Grace Slick’s rich deep contralto, I think the album is best enjoyed the old fashioned way — stoned.

Twelve hours on the road is a long time, but it’s a good amount of time to work out some of the emotional concerns I was carrying with me, about the direction of my work, the direction of several friendships that mean a lot to me, the meaning of life in general and my life in particular, and the point of existence. I rolled across the border from North Carolina into Georgia just as the sun was setting.

I didn’t take the time to drive west on Betty’s Creek Road to say hello to Hambidge, maybe say hello to the grouse that lives outside the cabin I had. The place is often deserted on a Saturday night, but it was getting dark, and if someone were at home in my cabin, my approach down the one-lane rutted road to the turning circle might indeed cause him or her some concern. Instead, I bought a sandwich and a drink at the Clayton Oil Chevron in Dillard and continued on to the Quality Inn near the McDonald’s in Clayton.

I am not a stranger in a strange land in this neck of northern Georgia. I sojourned here for a month, ate breakfast every morning at the Clayton McDonald’s, made some friends, even. I have gallivanted so much and so widely that 600 miles from home I am still not in new territory. I sat on the balcony of my room for a while, listening to the cadences of the southern drawls that were coming up from the families having a late evening splash in the hotel pool.

I thought of the people who love me, the people who support every step I take away from them, whose joy and care travel with me as mine, I hope, stays with them. In a sense, they never leave me.

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