The New Yorker
Are We There Yet?
Countdown
In 1969, the drive from Minneapolis to St.
Louis took twelve hours and was mostly on two-lane roads. My parents woke me up
for it at dawn. We had just spent an outstandingly fun week with my Minnesota
cousins, but as soon as we pulled out of my uncle’s driveway these cousins
evaporated from my mind like the morning dew from the hood of our car. I was
alone in the back seat again. I went to sleep, and my mother took out her
magazines, and the weight of the long July drive fell squarely on my father.
To get through the day, he made himself into
an algorithm, a number cruncher. Our car was the axe with which he attacked the
miles listed on road signs, chopping the nearly unbearable 238 down to a still
daunting 179, bludgeoning the 150s and 140s and 130s until they yielded the
halfway humane 127, which was roundable down to 120, which he could pretend was
just two hours of driving time even though, with so many livestock trucks and
thoughtless drivers on the road ahead of him, it would probably take closer to
three. Through sheer force of will, he mowed down the last twenty miles between
him and double digits, and these digits he then reduced by tens and twelves
until, finally, he could glimpse it: “Cedar Rapids 34.” Only then, as
his sole treat of the day, did he allow himself to remember that 34 was the
distance to the city center—that we were, in fact, less than thirty
miles now from the oak-shaded park where we liked to stop for a picnic lunch.
The three of us ate quietly. My father took
the pit of a damson plum out of his mouth and dropped it into a paper bag,
fluttering his fingers a little. He was wishing he’d pressed on to Iowa
City—Cedar Rapids wasn’t even the halfway point—and I was wishing we were back
in the air-conditioned car. Cedar Rapids felt like outer space to me. The warm
breeze was someone else’s breeze, not mine, and the sun overhead was a harsh
reminder of the day’s relentless waning, and the park’s unfamiliar oak trees
all spoke to our deep nowhereness. Even my mother didn’t have much to say.
But the really interminable drive was through
southeastern Iowa. My father remarked on the height of the corn, the blackness
of the soil, the need for better roads. My mother lowered the front-seat
armrest and played crazy eights with me until I was just as sick of it as she
was. Every few miles a pig farm. Another ninety-degree bend in the road.
Another truck with fifty cars behind it. Each time my father floored the
accelerator and swung out to pass, my mother drew frightened breath:
“Fffff!
“Ffffffff!
“Fffff—fffffffff!—oh!
earl! oh!
Fffffff!”
There was white sun in the east and white sun
in the west. Aluminum domes of silos white against white sky. It seemed as if
we’d been driving steadily downhill for hours, careering toward an
ever-receding green furriness at the Missouri state line. Terrible that it
could still be afternoon. Terrible that we were still in Iowa. We had left
behind the convivial planet where my cousins lived, and we were plummeting
south toward a quiet, dark, air-conditioned house in which I didn’t even
recognize loneliness as loneliness, it was so familiar to me.
My father hadn’t said a word in fifty miles.
He silently accepted another plum from my mother and, a moment later, handed
her the pit. She unrolled her window and flung the pit into a wind suddenly
heavy with a smell of tornadoes. What looked like diesel exhaust was rapidly
filling the southern sky. A darkness gathering at three in the afternoon. The
endless downslope steepening, the tasselled corn tossing, and everything
suddenly green—sky green, pavement green, parents green.
My father turned on the radio and sorted
through crashes of static to find a station. He had remembered—or maybe never
forgotten—that another descent was in progress. There was static on static on
static, crazy assaults on the signal’s integrity, but we could hear men with
Texan accents reporting lower and lower elevations, counting the mileage down
toward zero. Then a wall of rain hit our windshield with a roar like deep-fry.
Lightning everywhere. Static smashing the Texan voices, the rain on our roof
louder than the thunder, the car shimmying in lateral gusts.
“Earl, maybe you should pull over,” my mother
said. “Earl?”
He had just passed milepost 2, and the Texan
voices were getting steadier, as if they’d figured out that the static couldn’t
hurt them: that they were going to make it. And, indeed, the wipers were
already starting to squeak, the road drying out, the black clouds shearing off
into harmless shreds. “The Eagle has landed,” the radio said. We’d crossed the
state line. We were back home on the moon.
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