October 6, 2008

Ramble On

Leaves are fallin’ all around.
Time I was on my way
Thanks to you I’m much obliged
Such a pleasant stay
But now it’s time for me to go
The autumn moon lights my way
But now I smell the rain
And with it pain,
And it’s headin’ my way.
-Led Zeppelin

It was three Septembers ago, that I bid goodbye to Nathaniel, who had so kindly (along with his parents) hosted in me in one of the oldest houses I’d ever visited in in the woods of Vermont. That fall snap hit the air and as I watched the early maple on his dirt driveway signal the onset of fall, I began to feel an urgency to get on the road one more. It was a kind of urgency that  hadn’t nagged me in the heat of a southern summer, through warm New York City nights or even as I’d navigated the incomprehensible highways of Canada.

There was something so bittersweet about that parting; I had made a friend with bright shining eyes, a sharp mind and a penchant for adventure. For a few weeks we trundled through woods picking blackberries, hiked along mountain streams through tiny caves, read by the fireplace, and danced in the city hall of a tiny town that had never seen the likes of us.

My heart ached as I rumbled down the dirt drive for the last time, for the friendship, for the fall and for the loss of summer. I didn’t know what I was heading towards… just driving blindly into the future with little but a point on a map, a few phone numbers of friends of a friend and the transient’s glimpse into other people’s lives, the imagination of possibility. Vermont with its crumbling barns, fields of sweet white corn and tiny brown and green highway signs had captured the part of me that New York City had failed to reach.

I shed my tears, cranked up the stereo and wound through the twisting mountain roads and into the Adirondacks for several days, pulling over to photograph the finger-like lakes and marvel at the mist over the water, enshrouding tiny islands. I made my camp in the woods in the remotest spot I could find, wondering if at this late date in the season my will and my vehicle, a 1988 Ford Camper Van that I named Steinbeck, would carry me across the Dakotas and into the beast that is the Rockies… if I’d summit those peaks and tumble down into the hills and valleys of the West Coast, and find a home in Seattle.

By the time I’d reached Chicago, the choked expressways, the neat rows of bungalows, the expanse of water— I was too tired to go on. A few days perched in a high-rise above Lake Michigan and I was ready to stop moving. Allowing myself one last hurrah, at the urging of friends I drove to St. Louis to reunite with dance and dancers. By the end of the week-end, I had a place to stay back in Chicago, so I turned my rig around and on October 1st, through a beating rain, drove towards my new home.

Now each year, as the leaves turn, the morning air bites my toes when my feet hit the floor and I cozy up with a cup of tea, I hold a little celebration for my haphazard decision to land in a City that until that last week in September I had never seen, knew little of and had never even considered. That ramblin’ part of me settles in for the winter.