PA 332

The driver’s side window of the ’95 Camry wagon was wide open.  The humid summer air poured in, cooled only slightly by the perpetual motion of the car, which cruised at a lazy sixty miles per hour up PA 322.  Corey hung his arm out the window – his elbow cocked to a ninety, his palm parallel to the ground, cutting through the air like a wing.  Everything inside the car whipped in the frenzy of the wind, and the roaring turbulence of the passing miles made conversation between the passengers far from effortless.

                “You know,” called out Corey, without taking his eyes off the road, “Pops would always tell me that you’d get better mileage by just using the A/C.  I’m not sure I believe him though.”  He punctuated the statement by allowing his hand to be caught up by the oncoming wind, and undulate in the current like a thin sail in the tempest.  “Supposedly, the loss in aerodynamics outweighs the fuel energy necessary to run the air conditioner.”  He gripped the edge of the door frame above his head.  “Even if he were right, I prefer the windows open.  It’s not as…” Corey paused, as his voice broke with the last word.  His right hand darted beneath the frames of his sunglasses, wiped quickly, and returned to the steering wheel.  “It’s not as depressing.  You know what I mean?”

                Nobody responded.  And had a voice responded, the driver would have been hard pressed to hear the response over the constant wind-driven commotion.  He glanced through his shades at the rearview mirror, and put his eyes immediately back on the road.

                 Pennsylvania 322 cut a diagonal path across the state through some of the most remote country in the Northeast, from where it entered the state in Philadelphia to its unassuming exit into New York’s Southern Tier.  It was a narrow, winding highway – often yellow-white and cracked and riddled with potholes.  Through cornfields and meadows, hillbilly towns and podunk villages it meandered aimlessly.  On occasion, the road climbed into the lower elevations of the Appalachians.  Hugging cliff sides and sheer faces, slipping past gorges and valleys, the highway allowed the traveler breathtaking vistas and photo opportunities aplenty.  Corey had become reacquainted with the highway about an hour east of Harrisburg, when he turned off his steady journey northward through the southern states to take a more westerly track through the heart of Pennsylvania.

                “I used to travel this highway three times a year for a solid decade,” he said with another quick peek at the rearview mirror.  “Once or twice in the summer for sure.  Then again on either Thanksgiving or Christmas, depending on whose turn it was.  The first time I hated it – so empty, so country.  ‘How can anybody live out here,’ I thought.  I mean look at it!  Barely a sign of civilization for miles.” Corey panned an extended finger across the breadth of the windshield.  Before him the highway’s slender, white, bending line cut in half a wide expanse of rolling terrain.  To his left, one great hill swelled upward from the road’s edge.  A massive green slope it was, carpeted with tall, broad-leaf grass, and rose swiftly away to a dense tree line about a half-mile away.  To his right, the land continued the slope of the hill downward and away from him, though not as steeply.  For miles the countryside ran until the green of the foliage and the blue-grey of the sky blended into one hazy, nebulous summer horizon.  Dotting the landscape were only a handful of barns and even fewer farmhouses.  Closest to the highway, in the foreground of the bucolic scene, was a church – a white, rectangular building large enough to hold a meager congregation of devoted, complete with stained glass windows and a steeple stretching its lonely spire to Heaven.  A dirt service road a hundred yards from the highway led to a vacant dirt parking lot just out front of the church entrance.

                “An empty church in an empty valley,” said Corey solemnly.  “I remember those Sundays with your grandfather.  Of course we didn’t live in the middle of nowhere, but that churchy feeling is the same everywhere.  Showing up once a week, all dressed to the nines.  Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down, shut up and listen.  Summers were the worst.  No air conditioners in those places.  Long-sleeved shirt and tie, sitting perfectly still unless you wanted the look from your grandfather.  Apparently, God prefers his people uncomfortable.  Shaking hands at the end, fake smiles and vein chatter.  Then it was over.  Everybody leaves, and it’s an empty building and empty parking lot for the next six days.”  The car passed by the church, as simultaneously Corey felt the swell of anxiety exit his body through his fingertips.  “But that’s what we’re heading into,” he continued with a sigh of defeat.  “It’s not fun, believe me.  But I promise this is the only time I’ll make you do it.”

                Onward the aged wagon plodded along the highway.  Onward and upward – quite literally – it climbed, as PA 322 began to gradually rise on a steady incline for about a mile, before it plunged into the wooded foot of a small mountain.  Presently, it was an hour past noon, and the sun – and the heat – was at its zenith.  To the west, creeping over the higher elevations, were great white-grey clouds, slowly amassing and marching eastward.  The wind of the world was increasing as well, occasionally gusting, tossing the trees of the foothills about in a kaleidoscope animation of pale-green and yellow fluttering leaves.  Corey silently welcomed the clouds and the wind and the oncoming shadows of the mountain road.  “We can be expecting a storm tonight!” he shouted to the mirror.

                It was only another minute before Corey found himself beneath the shadows of the pine needle and maple leaf canopy of the forest.  The temperature change was immediately noticeable and well-appreciated.  He took a deep breath and held it in his lungs for more than a second.  The air was clean – still damp and laden with the day’s humidity – but it was cool and bore the fragrance of a dozen flowering plants.  Moreover, it was free of the acrid scent of sun-parched pavement and burning rubber.

                Corey removed his glasses from his eyes, and placed them just above his forehead upon a quaff of windblown, auburn hair.  “This is my favorite part of the trip,” he said, looking into the mirror.  “There’ll be nothing for miles but trees, rocks, and canyons.  I know I complained about the emptiness before, but this is different.  There’s a difference between the absence of people in nature, and the isolation you feel when driving by a godforsaken farmhouse, or hollow church.”  Deftly did he continue to negotiate the tight corners and narrow passages of the mountain highway, all the while carrying on his conversation – a one-sided exposé composed to convince himself that the lonely countryside was indeed no place in which anybody should want to live.  “Pops would take me out in woods just like these, when all the women were cackling in the den.  The first time I ever fired a rifle was with him.  I wasn’t much of a shot, but it was fun.  I suppose it was also the first time I ever felt like part of the family.”  For the second time on the trip Corey had to stop talking and clench his jaw fast.  His throat swelled, and he swallowed hard.  “None of that matters now,” he muttered.

                The age-weary station wagon had been steadily climbing up the mountain pass for nearly an hour when the unbroken line of trees at last ended abruptly, for the wooded hill to the right gave way to a wide expanse of open air.  Gripping a sheer face of clay-brown stone on the left, PA 322 made a wide bend around a steep valley.  Near the center of the bend, the narrow shoulder widened and jutted out subtly into the void – a gravelly overlook for curious passersby.  Corey pulled off the highway and onto the gravel.  Pivoting on his elbow, he turned to look into the back seat and smiled, his face yet red with manifest emotion.  “Whadaya say we have a look?!”

                 Checking quickly for oncoming traffic, Corey hopped out of the driver seat and jogged around the front of the wagon to the passenger side.  He opened the back door, fiddled for a few moments, and carefully heaved to his shoulder a soft bundle of pink.  “Let’s be careful, Lydia,” he whispered to the infant.  Bouncing his daughter gently in his arms, Corey moved to the edge of the overlook and stopped a foot away from the guardrail.  He took a step back; for before his feet the earth fell away into a great rift.  To his right, the mountain side dove immediately down, so drastically that but a few determined trees could cling to the descending slope.  To his left, the road bowed concave along the cliff wall, until disappearing around another bend.  The two sides of the v-shaped canyon came together in the center of the panorama – a meeting accentuated by a corrugated metal drain from which flowed the thin ribbon of a red-brown creek, meandering carelessly away beyond the bend.

                There in the cool of the high elevation, beneath an ever-darkening cloudy ceiling, Corey and Lydia stared up into the sky, out across the expanse, down into the abyss.  The bubbling of the creek reverberated about the walls of the valley and met the ears of the observers.  It was a calming sound, an entrancing sound, drowned out only seldom by a passing car. “I feel like I could stay here forever,” said Corey to his daughter and to Nature herself.  “The temperature is perfect.  The view literally steals my breath.  I want to swim in the river, scale the cliff side, climb a tree.  I want to lie on my back for days and watch the clouds pass off to wherever they’re called.  I want to be part of this land.”  Here he paused, and turned to face his daughter directly.  “But that’s not how life works, sweetie.  Eventually the sun will set, and it will get cold.  And the rain will come, and the wind will sting our faces.  The trees will rage.  This beautiful, flawless scene will vanish… because we are not meant to linger here, and the land is telling us that.    You see, we’re only ever allowed a moment’s peace in any given blissful instant, until the environment turns inhospitable and we are thrown out before the storm front.  You might want to return, but the faces have changed, and the winds will blow against you, and it will never look or feel the same as it had during that one perfect moment.  But never mourn your loss, Lydia; it was never yours to lose in the first place.  Pay your respects.  Get in the car.  Find a new view.”

                And he did just that.

                Two hours after their initial entering into the mountains, Corey and Lydia emerged from the steepness of the first ranges, and found themselves in a land of similar elevation, but strewn with more modest hills and gentle ascents.  Farms appeared again in open valleys – farms where no crops grew.  Dilapidated hovels sidled the highway.  The occasional town to appear along their path was black with memory of oil production – decrepit, deteriorating, and all but abandoned.  “The only reason I used to look forward to this part of the trip was because it meant it was almost over,” explained Corey to his daughter.   He rolled up his window – whether he did so to shut out the looming despair, or the light shower which had just come upon them, he did not voice aloud.  “I used to drive through towns like this all the time when I was a little older than you.  Your grandfather made me come on his business trips.  ‘Gotta see the world, son.   See how others live.  See how lucky you have it,’ he’d say.  Passing through towns like these were his way of inspiring me to work hard and get a good education.  All it really did was make me wary of these poor little villages, and, I’ll admit, it put a chip on my shoulder – like somehow I was better than the people who lived like this.”  Corey tapped his window in the direction of a two-story brick face house.  The porch – what remained of it – was a grey-white, splintered heap of wood.  The front door was faded green.  Shingles were missing everywhere on the roof, and a tattered blue tarp straddled the roof ridge, hopelessly resisting the now steady drizzle. “But Pops showed me the error of my ways.  A lot of good people, hardworking people, live in homes just like that, or worse.”  Even as he reminisced, the car rolled through the center of the town, passing storefront after storefront, boarded up and forlorn.  “That’s not to say I wanna live here,” he added with a twist of the mouth.

                The road ushered Corey and his daughter further through a half-dozen more dreary towns on a dreary day in the heart of dreary Pennsylvania.   In one village, an ice cream shack sat on the side of the road, its patrons huddled beneath a great oak tree, as stealthy rain drops fell upon their melting cones.  Similarly did a group of teens seek shelter beneath the awning of a convenience store in the next town.  They blew grey cigarette smoke out into the air while cursing the rain and their parents and life itself in godforsaken obscurity.  Surely, no two towns were exactly alike, but mile after mile, Corey found one local custom remarkably consistent: staring.  Gawking, squinting, leering, with tilted heads and mouths agape, the natives postured at the sight of the foreign wagon rolling through their neighborhood.  It was as though a silent alarm had been raised, and like wild things did they clamber to windows and draw back their hoods and cease their conversations to address the intruder in their territory.  “I don’t think we’re welcome, Lyds,” said Corey over his shoulder with a forced smile.  “Maybe they know why we’re here.  Or maybe I’m just imagining it.  Guilty conscience and all that.”

                Sixteen hours after setting off from his home, Corey pulled the wagon to a slow stop at an intersection which bore no characteristics to distinguish it from the hundred other intersections he had passed through that afternoon.  The rain was torrential.  Even with the wipers set to their maximum, he could barely make out the green sign on the corner reading: Albertville 1 Mile with an arrow pointing to the right.  Corey looked left for oncoming headlights, then pulled out in the direction of the arrow.

                It didn’t take long for memories to begin cascading before his eyes like the deluge upon his windshield.  “Pops used to play guitar there.” he said tapping on the window toward the Beaver Hotel and Lounge, which resembled neither of the things its name claimed to be.  It was a two-story brick building with a blue wooden door and a single small window, in which hung an orange neon Open sign, spastically flickering on and off.  “The last time I visited he invited me to play the drums with him and his band.  That man could play.  I thought I was a decent drummer until I got on stage with him.  Sixty-three years old and I couldn’t keep up.  He played Hotel California like Joe Walsh himself.  Joe Walsh was the guitarist from the Eagles, baby.  In case you were wondering.”  She made no reply.

                “There’s the ice cream stand we would visit in the summer,” continued Corey, pointing in every which direction, as he gave his daughter the grand tour of Albertville’s unimpressive main drag.  “There’s the baseball field where I played right-field for his church league softball team one time.  And up that hill is where we’d find Christmas trees to cut down, the day after Thanksgiving.  Your grandfather wouldn’t let us put up the tree until two weeks before Christmas, and even then it was just dragging the plastic tree down from the attic.  I used to beg him for a real tree, but it was always the same response.  ‘They make too much of a mess – needles everywhere.  And are you going to crawl under it to water it every morning?  I doubt it.’  I told him I would.  I promised.  If he had just given me the chance I could’ve shown him that I could take care of that tree…  Nope.”  Corey gazed pensively at the slope he had once explored alongside his father-in-law.  He attempted once more to brace himself against a wave of emotion, but his effort was fruitless.  Openly and violently he wept as he drove through the downpour.  It took more than a few minutes to regain himself.  He dried his eyes and wiped his nose with his sleeve.  “Fake trees…” he bellowed, “not in our house, kiddo!”

                The wagon crept by a few more gravestones from Corey’s former life, before reaching the very edge of the town limits, where the rows of crumbling red-brown brick facades gave way to trailer parks and uncultivated fields and the blight of failed industry.  But it was not long after leaving the heart of Albertville that Corey began to peer more anxiously ahead.  Around every curve of the road he raised his brows and hunched over his steering wheel.  “I know it’s coming up soon,” he assured Lydia.  “I only went there once.  Pops went every Sunday morning, but he didn’t really care if I joined them or not.  ‘Drink some coffee and find God in the clouds,’ he’d say.”  He hadn’t finished the sentence when, at last, appearing around a wooded bend, was a white church with a white steeple and a great brown cross erected out front.  Corey’s pulse quickened and his mouth ran dry.  Ever more tightly he gripped the wheel, as his arms unwillingly turned it in the direction of the gravel parking lot beside the building.  He parked the car far from the cluster of domestic minivans and SUV’s, in a spot farthest from the many windows along the side of the whitewashed church, farthest from God himself if the feat could be achieved.

                “We’re here,” said Corey with a long exhale.  He turned completely around in his seat and began to nervously unbuckle his daughter.  “This won’t take long.  Walk in, pay our respects, walk out.  No big deal.  Stupid buckle won’t…” He fought with the clasp on the car seat for a moment more, his anxiety intensifying his frustration, until his trembling hands had nearly snapped the plastic in two.  “Fucking, goddam buckle!” he shouted as he pulled himself back in defeat and shame.  Lydia looked up at her father and giggled.

                “Sorry, Lyds,” said Corey.  Calmly then did he rejoin his campaign against the car seat, prevailing at last.  “There’s nothing to be nervous about.  We’re not here for ceremony.  We’re here not here for honor or respect or responsibility, whatever the heck that means.  You’re just here to say hello, and I’m here to say goodbye.”

                Corey and his daughter arrived at the arched entrance to the church drenched to the skin.  Through the oak doors traveled the resounding chords of a grand piano leading a hundred unhallowed voices in worship.  The travelers entered, the song of praise flooding the small foyer into which they stepped.  The father did his best to dry his daughter’s face, but saturated as they were, the enterprise was fruitless.  And so with one last breath, he carried her on his hip into the sanctuary, leaving a trail of water-stained red carpet in his wake.

                Slowly a commotion rippled throughout the pews.  Elbows nudged rib cages, and lips pressed close to ears as rumor radiated outward from the center of the sanctuary to the walls.  The song of feigned devotion – once grand and boastful – waned with every step that Corey took, until even the piano clanged to an abrupt, discordant stop.  The hall, which only a minute ago had been overflowing with melody, was presently hushed, but for the hissing of whispers from godless mouths.  Dozens of squinting eyes peered forward with palpable malice as an echo from their past now stood in their midst not five feet from the coffin.

                “What are you doing here, Corey?!” came a screech from the front pew.  A thin woman clad in black presently shot up from her seat to continue her barrage, heaving spite with every word, making no attempt to hide her contempt. “You were not invited.  You have no right to be here.  I don’t even know how you found out about the funeral.  I want you out of here.  Immediately!”  Her last sentence was accented by a tall, hook-nosed young man springing to her side and placing his right arm about her waist.  He spoke no words, but his clenched left fist and scowl spoke volumes.

                Despite the rebuke and the show of intimidation, Corey did not flinch.  He remained steadfast, with his daughter in his arms, at the front of the sanctuary.  He turned to the coffin and began to approach.

                “Didn’t you hear me?!” screamed the woman.  “Get the fuck out of here!  I want you ou..”

                “I don’t care what you want,” shot back Corey.  He turned away from the dead and addressed the woman again.  “You got to tell me what you wanted.  You wanted to figure us out.  You wanted to take a break.  Then you wanted to be done with me.  You wanted to pursue your new love – he’s charming by the way – and move back to your family, and have a new life apart from me.  And you got to do just that, whether I wanted it or not. It’s fine, too.  In fact, I’m glad that’s what you wanted; because if you hadn’t wanted that, I never would’ve had Lydia, here, with my wife.  I never would’ve had a real family of my own, or known what it feels like to be desired.  I would’ve wasted away in our sad, pathetic, selfish relationship, ignorant of what this existence has to offer.  So, thank you for that.  Thank you for kicking me out of your world.  But I’m done listening to what you want.  What I want is to introduce your father to the granddaughter he never got to meet.  What I want is to say goodbye to the father you took away from me, and tell him I love him.”  It was a speech he had rehearsed for nearly five years.  Satisfied with his delivery – not to mention the stupefied expression it had left on his attacker’s face – Corey left her before the alter, as he should have done fifteen years prior.

Presently, he found himself before the shadow of his hero. There was no prepared speech this time, no great oration to stagger the haughty gallery.  There was only intimacy, and a rending heart.

“Hey, Pops,” Corey spoke the words like a secret.  He leaned over the edge of the casket, and held his daughter before the sealed eyes of his adoptive father.  “Meet Lydia.  This isn’t exactly how I had imagined you two meeting for the first time.  But I needed you to see her firsthand.  And I needed her to see you – not some picture of you stashed away in a shoebox.  She had to meet the man that made me the father I am to her, even if she never remembers it.

“It’s not fair, you know,” he said, his voice straining through the sorrow.  “She threw me away and kept what she liked – the dog, the coffee table, and my dad.  I wanted to call, especially on Christmas, or to tell you happy birthday.  Didn’t want to put you in an awkward position, though.”  He paused.  “I just wanted to thank you, Pops.  You taught me respect.  You taught me how to embrace the people around me.  You showed me that God exists outside the walls of a church, and that it doesn’t make me a bad person for trying to find him elsewhere.  If I can be half the man you were, then I know my daughter will be in good hands.”  Corey bent and kissed the cold forehead of the deceased, as his tears ran down both their cheeks.  “Bye, dad.”

All was silent, save the pattering of the rain upon the roof, which presently was tapering to a drizzle.  Nobody said a word to Corey as he passed his former wife, and carried Lydia once more down the red aisle.  Heads turned and brows remained firmly stitched as the two made their way out, but none dared speak.

By the time Corey had reached the doorway, the rain had all but stopped.  They stepped out of the stale church air into a fresh world, cleansed by the storm.  And in the surface of the puddles scattered about the parking lot, the orange-red of a setting sun glinted.  “Let’s go home,” said Corey to his daughter.

And he did just that.