SEPTEMBER 20, 2021 – My wife rode home earlier with our weekend guests. Hours later, I loaded the car and departed from the Red Cabin.
Once I’d transitioned from local, sleepy roads to byways south and west, I imagined myself sitting alone in a compartment aboard a long-distance train hurtling across foreign lands. I luxuriated in the silence of my thoughts—no music, no radio, no podcasts, no audio books. The countryside flew past—near portions, frantically, as if late for an important rendezvous, while more distant scenery traveled at a thoughtful pace.
In the quietude of my “compartment,” I contemplated pleasant memories of the weekend, concerns of the larger world, work that lay ahead this coming week, and . . . anxieties, threatening to convert my passenger train into an overloaded freight train without brakes. In response I “created” a siding where the freight train could yield to less worrisome thoughts.
My compartment wasn’t noiseless. Along various stretches my car tires dashing over patched pavement mimicked the clickety-clack of railcar wheels crossing rail seams. Along other portions of road, recently resurfaced, “clickety-clack” was absent, as if along a route of the SNCF across northern France.
Also, in syncopation with “clickety-clack,” a handle of the old Coleman cooler, in which we haul our perishables to and from the Red Cabin and which I’d loaded onto the lowered seat behind me, knocked lightly against the cooler. If Beth had been traveling with me this wouldn’t have been tolerated. A tea-towel would’ve been yanked from the laundry bag and tied to the cooler handle to buffer the noise. On this trip, I let it go, pretending it was the door at the end of the railcar, ajar and jostled rhythmically against its frame, or better yet, the handle of an old valise, stowed on the overhead rack—the image of a long-haul, cross-border, overnight journey to new horizons.
By the time I’d crossed the St. Croix into Minnesota and turned south on winding, undulating S.H. 95, the moon had risen above the tree line. The scene was no less awe-inspiring than the previous full moon—or the thousandth one before that. Instantly, I wished that I could’ve remained at the lake to see lunar light shimmering across the water. I realized, however, that there I wouldn’t be viewing the moon in its dynamic mode, flying through a row of trees along the roadside, then skimming over thick woods on the other side of a large field. Here, now, the moon raced me puckishly across the countryside.
Long gone was the sun—a spherical concentration of nuclear fusion 109 times the circumference of the earth. In its place: a pretender—a round rock one-fourth the circumference of earth, yet, from our perspective, exactly the size of Helios, as “confirmed” by full solar eclipses.
As my high-speed train pulled into our driveway, the moon too finished the race, and with majestic ease smiled at me from its seat atop a thin, wispy cloud above the trees.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
