Dreamers Rise
An Open Notebook
And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight
Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate.
 Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) | |||||
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A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. The Drowned Train (c.1979) (In an earlier posting I wrote of the dream that was the genesis of this story fragment, which was written sometime in the late 1970s. I recently came across my original typescript, of which I had only the haziest of recollections. The story breaks off before reaching the pivotal scene alluded to in the title; there may be another fragment somewhere in my papers, but the story was certainly never completed. I have cleaned up the text a bit, but some flaws I have just left alone.) A few years ago I coming home through New England after spending a week in Canada, taking old roads because I had no deadlines and was in no particular hurry to get back. It was mid-spring and the weather had been bad the entire week: wet snow in the north, ceaseless drizzle as I headed south. I had spent half the day in a village in northern Vermont, getting a tire fixed, finding a meal, and then walking around in the wet, quiet streets. As night fell I decided not to try to make it home that night, though I could have done so easily enough, but to drive on instead until I was out of the mountains and then find somewhere along the river to stay the night. By the time it was completely dark I was almost alone on the road, which followed a long, high, twisting ridge with no settlements or signs other than the tiny, regular state road markers and one large wooden sign announcing my arrival in a national forest. The rain, which had slackened off to a barely noticeable mist, began to pick up again and I was forced to slow down. Here and there I could see patches of soggy snow under the pines, but it seemed warm enough, in fact unseasonably warm, that I wouldn't have to worry that the rain might begin to freeze on the road. Quickly the storm picked up; I passed pine branches blown onto the road, huge drops exploded around my wipers, and a thick torrent of rainwater poured off the edges of my windshield. I slowed down, saw a sign for a roadside picnic table, and pulled over to park, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. I found my thermos and poured out a cup of lukewarm coffee. The lights of a solitary northbound car appeared ahead, approached slowly, and passed — a Jeep, from the look of it, or a Land Rover. I opened a map, folded it closed again after a minute, waited, yawned, sipped coffee. I tried the radio but could only tune in a single faint station — country and western — so I switched it off. The engine slowed and began to sputter; I pressed on the gas and raced it for a minute so it wouldn't stall. The rain did not begin to let up for nearly an hour; then, quite abruptly, the storm broke and the wind tailed off. Dozing on and off, I waited a bit longer. With only a fine drizzle falling now, I got out of the car to stretch my legs for a moment. It was unbelievably still; there was no breeze, no cars came by. The road ahead, dark and littered with pine needles, looked as if it had not been used in a year. I wondered how far in any direction I would have had to walk to find another human soul. The packed crowds of cities, the miles of suburban strips, no longer seemed to be part of the same world, as if the storm had produced a great flood that had swept all that away once and for all, as if when I descended I would find everything gone. I stood in the damp for a while until I began to shiver in the now increasing cold of evening. In the car I looked at my watch; making it home, fatigued as I was, was out of the question. My immediate problem was to find a room before whatever accommodations awaited me in the next town filled up, or before the innkeeper turned in for the night. As I figured it, the end of the ridge could only be a few miles down the road. Reaching it, and descending the slope to the river and civilization, should take no more than a half-hour. The descent from that ridge, as it turned out, is one of the steepest and most winding bits of road I have ever driven on. Had the wet pavement begun to freeze — and by now it was only barely too warm for that — I would have been reluctant to attempt it, and would have resigned myself to spending the night along the roadside in my car. A rocky stream, just a couple of yards across, descends alongside it, and on that particular night it was quick and swollen; though I could rarely see it in the dark I could clearly hear its roar, even with my windows shut. Here and there road and stream changed sides, the road winding over it on short and narrow bridges. At the bottom of the slope, just where the forest thinned out into patches of sumac scrub, there was a final, wooden bridge. It was only as I crossed over that I realized that the stream beneath had risen so far that it was just beginning to flow over the bridge. The car tires drove thick waves of rainwater skyward as it passed. Beyond the bridge the road climbed again, but only a bit, reaching a broad plateau which parallels the river for many miles. The stream from the mountains, momentarily hidden in the trees, cuts through this plateau for a distance of about three miles, bending well off to the east of the road, then it bends back, running alongside it for a bit before finally passing under the road one final time and continuing on to the slow moving river itself. The town to which I was heading was just to the south of this point; from there it is possible to cross to the river's other shore. I had been driving on level ground for no more than a mile, passing through a dark, plowed field from which the newly planted crop of corn had not yet emerged, when I noticed that the car was pulling perceptibly to one side. Even before I pulled the car to a stop and got out I knew what the problem was: the seal on the repaired tire had not held, and I would have to replace it with my disreputable spare. I looked to see if I could creep into town first, but the tire was too far gone and coming away from the wheel. Cursing, I opened the trunk, dug out the jack and the spare from beneath the clutter, and set about changing the tire in the dark, aided only by my dim and flickering flashlight which I had propped up against a rock. Once finished, still muttering to myself, I hurled the jack and the bad tire into the trunk and drove on, now properly chilled from the mist and the valley breeze. A few miles further the road dipped, and I stopped. Where the stream rejoins the road there is a swamp a few hundred yards across, and the storm had flooded this, so that the road lay underwater between where I was and the next slight elevation. I got out of the car and walked ahead to see how deep the water was, but it was no use: a few inches deep at first, it quickly rose to two or three feet, perhaps even more than that further on. It would not be possible to drive on until the water receded. I backed the car up a few yards until I came to a place where I could turn around, then drove up to slightly higher ground. I pulled over to consider my options. Going forward was out, of course, but should I simply stay put until the morning or drive back north into the mountains? It would take nearly an hour to reach the last town I had passed through, and there was no guarantee of finding a room there or even a fresh cup of coffee. On the other hand, I had no way of knowing if the flood waters had crested; it was possible that by morning more of the road would be covered, not less, in which case I would have wasted time I could have used to backtrack. Finally I decided on a middle course: I would drive back up the ridge, find a place to pull over, and sleep until I could get news on the radio or until a northnound car came by. I drank the last of my cold coffee, bundled myself up as best I could, and headed up the road. When I approached the first bridge, however, I stopped. Floodwater was flowing down the pavement, spreading over the bridge and in my direction. I got out to size up the situation. The water was not deep, but when I came to the bridge I saw that the structure was not only submerged but actually breaking up, the column of water beneath it lifting the planks off the piers and scouring out the earth around them. On the far side two cars had stopped, their flashers blinking, the drivers sitting on the hood in yellow parkas. They saw me, waved and yelled, but it was impossible to hear them over the roar of the water. I opened my trunk and found a flare, which I managed to toss over to them. They nodded their thanks and carried it up the road a bit to light it. There was nothing I could do now except find high ground and wait. I drove along until I found a suitable spot, pulled over, and shut off the engine. I shifted over to the passenger seat, adjusted it back as far as it would go, and sat back, stretching out my legs. With the wind gusting and falling, and now and then shaking heavy drops from the trees above, I spent the night that way, shivering a bit, sleeping little. At the first grey light of dawn, chilled and unable to lie still any longer, I stepped out of the car to take a look around. In spite of the faintness of the daylight and a fugitive mist I could tell that the storm had moved on, and that the day would eventually be clear and even mild. I walked ahead a bit until I could see the low spot that had flooded the night before. The waters had largely receded, though here and there I saw wind rippling shallow water across the surface of the raod. Soon I would be able to make it through; in the meantime I returned to my car and sat down with the door open and my feet on the ground, feeling hungry and wishing I had saved one last swallow of coffee. After an hour or so the sky had cleared fully, though the air for now remained damp and cool. I started up the car and decided to drive back to the ruined bridge behind me to take a look. At some point in the night a highway crew or the police had erected a barrier on the far side, with a single light; there was no sign of the cars I had seen the night before. Of the bridge itself nothing remained except the concrete supports, and these were still eroding in the high water around them. I returned to my car and headed south; the road was clear now ahead of me and I crossed through the formerly submerged section without difficulty... April 18, 2007 [ Permalink ]
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