Where Farming Is RespectedI drive 3-5 times a week to my job at the pharmacy down the back roads, at least an hour's drive from any midwestern city you've ever heard of. The guy who does our taxes told me on Tuesday of even back-er roads that get me from this college town to the tiny pharmacy town (why couldn't the people I work with have told me about this route? but that is an entirely different post). So now I take them, and shave about 4 minutes off the trip.
Here is what my drive is like.
It takes me five minutes to get out of town in the morning, which can be infuriating, because it's not many tenths of a mile to travel, and much of it is spent sitting and waiting. I yell and yell. Then, past doctor's offices and over a bridge -- check the level of the creek -- and then I can usually fly. And I am usually late. I see chickens, some too close to the edge of the road.
The drive back to school is more interesting, so I'll go there.
Try not to get hit leaving the pharmacy parking lot, try not to get hit turning left out onto the main street of the town. Left at the big stoplight, where a major (as major as it gets around here) state route intersects a less-major one. Immediate right at a road named after the two towns it connects, and then a hard left in the road. Now I my face is mostly in a plastic bag filled with one cup of Cheerios, the first part of my lunch on the days that I teach.
The road is wind-y, twisting around the land on which sits old and crumbly houses with big old pickup trucks parked here and there out front, mud-caked. I see what could be horses or mules, and try to decide. Twist, twist, I see more things that are definitely horses, pintos. (This I know from 4" tall plastic horses I would trot around the landscape of my room as a child.) Sometimes they stretch their necks out over the dainty wire fences, groping for vegetation--trees, plants--just beyond their reach. I see their teeth.
I have to find with my lips the last of the Cheerios, trying to avoid inhaling the inevitable Cheerio-powder at the bottom of the bag, and look down quickly to get those that I dropped. In my head, I explain to the cop who has pulled me over for erratic-ness.
I come to the crossroads that I used to have to stop at the two-way stop for; now, with this route, I have the right-of-way, so I make a left. I put away the empty-but-for-powder bag and pull out the bag of 1/4c unsalted almonds, the second course. Slow way down through the two-way stop--I have right-of-way, but I'm afraid some maniac (I can see this so clearly in my head) will blow the stop sign and plow into me. I can't see much of the intersecting road until I'm nearly to the place where they meet, because of a hill on one side and woods on the other, so I always slow down. Grind the gears up the hill immediately following, downshift using the back of the wrist of the left hand, holding the bag of almonds, to steer as the right hand puts me into third.
The almonds go two at a time, and I have yet to pack an even number of almonds, for some reason, so I have to chew half of the last one on either side. I turn left onto the bigger road, and every single day a truck appears in the lane I'm crossing over the hill as I do so. Aack, I say.
I pass, to the right, the road that I would take were I to go home, but since I teach I continue straight. If I haven't finished my almonds, I do so now, marveling at the odd. I crumble the empty bag with the last one, in the front section of the blue bookbag on the passenger seat. On to dessert, which is, depending on how I felt this morning, either 5 or 6 Hershey's Nuggets. I unwrap them with my right hand, the left on the wheel, leaving one nugget end peeking out but the other end safely still wrapped so as not to touch the chocolate with my fingertips. They are frozen from being left in the car during my four hour shift, so as I pass the barns and the grass and the grasses, my teeth are scraping down their sides. Two, three small intersections. Cows, looking even more bedraggled than cows normally look, from the snow and the mud. One licks another's face, and I laugh at them. And then I think about hamburgers and Gucci purses.
It gets flatter, I cross a bridge, I look into the trees for deer. At least once a week I see one, or some, gathering in the road, looking at each other, communicating with their eyes, shrugs, what to do about this noisy thing coming at them? And inevitably, four will head the way they had been going and one will go back. I wonder if they're a family, and I wonder if they'll ever see each other again. Past their place now, I flash my lights at drivers coming at me, doubting they'll notice. The deer match the trees.
The ground is neutral and muddy, sprouting dead yellow grasses tinged after rain with green. The wind pushes over the cattails and tough, wide grasses, bobbing all season long.
Around one bend, and then another in the opposite direction, I catch a glimpse of the red light marking the road into town. I slow down, and look to the right for the farm on the corner. It's my favorite, because it has llamas and shetland ponies. Tiny, tiny ponies. What are they for? Llamas, I notice, each time I see them, walk like pigeons, poking their heads forward with each step. I wish I could ride a llama. I wish I didn't have to go to class, and could pull over and stay, coaxing a llama over and petting its goaty head.
But the house is so close I probably wouldn't anyway.
I look at the Toyota truck billboard to the left, among the weeds. I take a right, always right on red here for some reason, timing I guess, and crane my neck and check the rearview for the typical oncoming low-to-the-ground sportscar, the driver of which I will be annoying today. Right on time. I overdrive up the hill, staying about 10 over the whole way. I eat my second-to-last nugget, feeling around in the plastic bag for the other carefully wadded wrappers, and am satisfied that they're not floating around, hobnobbing with the novels and stacks of clipped 4-6 page double-spaced Times New Roman papers, to come surprise, popping out when I pull out the gradebook for attendance.
Sometimes there is a cop on this road, because the police station itself is further ahead, but usually I don't see one. I think I do, so I slow down anyway, but forget to slow down more. And I think about the time that my one friend told me that he would speed up passing the town hall, damn the man, etc. on behalf of my aspiring ecoterrorist boyfriend. I am unintentionally rebelling in the same way. Climb the hill into town (college town city on a hill, the lights of ignorance and great landscaping and subtle class resentment and not one but TWO belltowers clanging away to Beatles tunes (did we pay the copyright for those?) shining brightly) in fourth gear. Look to the right and see horseback riding students obediently posting awkwardly, up-down, etc. as they trot around the ring in the same way every day, ignoring the run-down jumps scattered throughout the middle of the circle they've formed. Velvet-black helmets and jeans rather than jodphurs.
We've walked the dogs under this bridge and they've barked at the horses that are now letting people post on them.
Up the hill, and slow way down, ped x-ing. But I slow down to get the best look possible for potential parking spaces in the red lot, the priviledged lot, that is always full. Or at least as I can tell, driving past, but then I see some that I missed, open spots indiciating the likelihood of open spots in the best lot, right next to the building I teach in, clearly associated with that building, an actual building. Later in the semester now, I foolishly count on a spot, but haven't yet been let down.
10 freakin minutes to get through this light. Last piece of chocoloate burning a yummy hole in the bag. I save it for between classes. Well, not 10 minutes I guess, but feels enough like it, where are all these people going? Two stoplights so close to one another, peds everywhere, in matching jackets, jeans, shoes, and hats. Some peds look like my students but turn out not to be. That happens every day, they turn out not to be.
A quick left after the lights, panic--what if there isn't a spot? Quick left into the parking lot, there is.
