Article 4 - "AT NIGHT WITH THE TASTE OF WINTER" January 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

    It started out as a drive out to get coffee, just a regular drive to get some warm liquid and see all the holiday light and cheer that went along with it. Christmas decorations with all their colors acted as beacons on the darkened roads without either street lights or traffic to guide your way. They sped by, beckoning with a warmth, that in the old days would guide a weary traveler off of his path. The coldness crept through a crack in the window, providing a whisper of fresh air in the stuffy but cozy cloud that billowed from the van's heater.

    The weather was cold out, perhaps in the twenties. But it was a lot milder than it had been the previous day when it had been in the teens, mild enough that it seemed like a great evening to explore the winter darkness that surrounded us. We passed by someone who had a gazebo dressed with all kinds of decorations like reindeer draped with holiday lights and inflated snowmen. The inflated one was needed because there was too little snow to make the real one. It was a welcome mat of sorts, one that broke the darkness and seemed like a fellow human waving in the distance before making his way on his own path.

    There was a quarter moon with Venus rising in the background. Sometimes our surroundings were clear. Then, in the distance, we could see the black outlines of the hills, distinguishable only by the hue of city lights. Other times, the clouds covered us in darkness, like a blanket that obscured everything in a secret shroud. With the radio on so low that the music was as blurred as our surroundings, it was as though we were slipping from reality to some netherworld where the spirits of the night came out to play. But then the clouds would part, and the dreamworld would fade and the kingdom of civilization surrounded us with its silent acknowledgment.

    With our coffee, we drove to find a place to hang out and observe what was around us. In a way, it seemed the roads went on forever in the night darkness. This seemed especially true on a country road with no landmarks. There we were, surrounded by nothing but trees , with a small sheet of snow covering the rural road in the hills. There was too little snow for outdoor adventures and for the snowplows to come out, but just enough to blur the lines of the path ahead of us. Because of this, it was difficult to determine where the end of the road was. Once the snow padded down on the and blocked in the trenches on the sides, the end of the road is a less obvious thing than in the world of concrete barriers and guardrails.

    Our travels found us on a county road that ran parallel to the interstate. The traffic chased past us in an anonymous race which they always won with their straight road and higher speed limit. Their lights were a moving decoration as colorful as the holiday lights decorated on front lawns, daring us to catch them as they moved. As if to confirm this instinct, we saw a closed off fishing access where we could pull over and watch them unseen, no lights around us but those that ran far from us on the highway away. If we couldn't catch them on the road, maybe we could catch them on camera.

    While we sat in the van, everything went dark. The silhouette of my husband was curtained in black, and even the sound seemed to be covered in the darkness. In this stillness, the spirit of the moment unwrapped images from my past like a movie. I though of all the times on our many road trips we stayed overnight in the van. I remembered the spookiness of being alone in a deserted place and not knowing for sure what was hidden behind the shadows, like an adult's version of a ghost story. As I thought of old personal adventures, the way random thoughts accompany a lull in any routine, my thoughts roamed to popular culture. I wondered about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, which was interesting because in normal life I never wondered about them at all. I thought of the Quaker guy I heard about in the news who was being threatened in Iraq for some reason I couldn't remember.

    The traffic raced towards us on the interstate, brushing past us in its flurry of lights that matched the red and white of many of the holiday decorations around us. At this hour, almost eight p.m., it was mostly trucks with their cargo in tow. They faced the stretches of road that go on and on. I wondered what they thought of in the long patches of solitude that accompanied them on the journey. The opal tranquility that I felt was deep and expansive, like the darkness continued forever in the anonymity, the ultimate proof of nature. I wondered if this feeling was shared by those who traveled the road besides me, or if their mind drifted off to other destinations.

    The trucks turned off at a local truck stop to fuel up at a gas station for their next encounter, as we did as well. Their distant figures were obscured by the dazzling white brightness of the store and islands, the buzzing lights flickering like candles in the window beckoning to travelers seeking shelter. Headlights on the highway sped past us, and we bid them farewell, perhaps to return another day to greet them.