Vapor Trails

Vapor trails frame my childhood home. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

I slept in my childhood home last night. I stopped there to catch a wink on my way back to Michigan from Cleveland. The house was dark and mostly empty when I arrived. No brothers or sister to be found. My mom had been gone nearly two years now. The only one left in the house was my dad, snoring loudly in his bedroom down the hall.

He told me he’d probably be in bed by the time I got there. He was right. I didn’t mind, I knew I’d be having breakfast with him at the local diner in the morning. His snoring didn’t bother me either. In fact, I kind of liked it. It was as soothing to me as the soft rumble of warm air being pushed out of the old furnace vent by the bedroom door.

The heat was a nice relief in the middle of a cold winter night. My old man kept the house a lot warmer than my mother did, that’s for sure. When we were kids, my younger brother used to joke that we could rent out our living room as a meat locker. He wasn’t far from the truth. My mother, who was in a perpetual state of menopause, kept the thermostat in our house routinely set somewhere between 58 and 60 degrees. Some days, if the light was just right, you could actually see your breath.

I chuckled at the thought as I took off my coat and threw it on the extra bed in what used to be the bedroom I shared with my brothers. My sister Dina had the other room to herself - puberty and gender pretty much guaranteed that arrangement, but I didn’t mind being crammed into a room with my brothers. We got along well because we all were equal parts mischievous and smart-ass

I pulled on my sweats and gazed around the room. It had changed quite a bit since the days when three adolescent boys occupied it. Gone were the posters of baseball players and rock bands. Much classier works of art had replaced them, all put there by my mother when she redecorated the room upon our departure. The bunk beds were gone too. In their place were two newer beds, both covered with fancy quilts and a menagerie of goofy country-crafty teddy bears. Hardly the teen-angst get-up my brothers and I had created, but still, the room felt pretty much the same.

The view out the picture window was just as I remembered. Facing north toward Lake Erie, the lights of the lime plant in Huron still shone as brightly through the crisp winter air as they did when I was a little boy and I was certain they were the lights at the North Pole.

The attic door in the corner of the room hadn't changed much either. It was still just as spooky as ever. So spooky that throughout my childhood, I made it a point to jam the end of my bed up against that door so it couldn’t be opened. When we were little kids, my mother informed us that a man had died on the roof while helping build the house back in 1926. To a kid that could mean only one thing – the man’s ghost was still in the house, more specifically, the attic! This meant there was no way in hell any of us kids were going to sleep at night unless the door to the attic was properly barricaded. Even now, as a 46-year-old grown man, that door was still giving me the willies.

My mom also put a bookcase in the room to try and make it look a tad more intellectual than it’s previous appearance. I’m not sure if a collection of books by Erma Bombeck and Dave Berry really did the trick, but it was a nice effort. More impressive to me was the fact that she had moved her album collection off the living room floor and into the bottom two shelves of the bookcase. The collection was nowhere near as massive as it had been in its heyday when it once threatened to take over the entire downstairs. My brother Lance, a professional musician, had sifted through and taken a fair amount of the collection, as had the rest of us, but it still was fairly large. It was nice that the albums were there, but somehow they seemed as out of place in the room as the kitschy teddy bears staring up at me from the bed.

It wasn’t all that late considering when I usually go to sleep, but I still crawled into bed – a much warmer, cozier bed than I ever remembered sleeping in before. Lights of passing cars crawled across the bedroom walls, just as they did when I was a kid. The sound of trucks downshifting on the Turnpike groaned in the distance. The furnace kicked on and off at perfect intervals and before long, I was sound asleep.

Crazy dreams of days past soon began to invade my slumber. Childhood dreams.

My body was lithe and my blonde hair flowed. I wore no eyeglasses, nor a shirt. My teeth were white and I was happy. I could run fast. Sometimes I could even fly. I was nice – a champion of all causes. Girlfriends from long ago began paying me visits. Not just one, but several, both real and imagined, until it became a full-blown lovers-of-the-past reunion. I even had dreams where I was talking about the dream I had just had while I was dreaming it - like a subconscious infinity mirror.

I was in houses I’d never been, meeting people I’d never met. One of my old college girlfriends introduced me to her husband. He was really short with a scarred face, and when I went to shake his hand, he extended a deformed, fleshy lobster claw in my direction, which I gladly shook. She had her hands full with three young kids, the youngest a two-year-old with curly blonde hair and a full set of grown up teeth speaking like a college professor, but wearing diapers.

Soon my dream shifted gears, now I was driving my car far out on a causeway in the middle of some lake, maybe Lake Erie. There was a bridge well off in the distance, but the road to the bridge was partially submerged in the water. Still, I pressed on. The wind picked up and began driving large waves over the road. I’d had this dream several times before, but not since my childhood. Now water was crashing into the side of my car, over the roof even. The car left the road and began to float, then sink. The clouds were incredible above me, a fiery mix of red and orange. I wasn’t scared, not even a little.

The next stop was a golf course that doesn’t exist. An impossibly difficult course I’d only ever played in my sleep. Three holes were all I’d ever gotten in, and tonight was no different. I played like a PGA pro for those three holes, but then, as always, the jig was up. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t tee off on the fourth hole. Suddenly doorframes were in my way and I couldn't get the ball to stop falling off the tee. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t complete my swing or even tee up the ball. Every golfer I know has this dream.

Next, I was back in school. My wife was there with me. It was the first time we’d met. She thought I was cute. I thought she was cute. It was strange because we were in middle school, but we were in our 20’s and we were way bigger and smarter than everyone else in the class, even the teachers. It was near the end of the school year and it was warm, so we skipped class and ran across the school lawn to a cemetery across the street, smiling and laughing the whole way. I felt no pain. My skin felt warm in the sun. I was young and carefree. I had no kids. I had no future. I had no past...

I woke up.

It was 7:30. My dad was already gone. I called him to see if he wanted to get some breakfast before I hit the road. He told me he was already waiting for me at the Main Street Café uptown. I made my bed, put the kitschy teddy bears back in their place and then got dressed.

My dreams stuck with me as I brushed a night’s worth or wool off my teeth and took a piss. Dreams always stick with me hard in the early morning – good or bad. When I was a kid I thought dreams were a glimpse into heaven. It was the unknown. A chance to visit places I’ve never been – a chance to do things I’ve never done, or could even do. I always liked dreams, even the ones that wake me up at 4 am in a cold sweat just as I’m about to get shot or stabbed. I feel alive when I’m dreaming. I like not having control of what’s going on. But these days I don’t sleep like I once did and my dreams aren’t what the used to be - except for last night, in my childhood home, when they were as clear and magical as ever.

I finished packing my things and headed outside. The sky was getting lighter, but the sun had yet to rise. Last night a million stars had occupied the space above our house. This morning, vapor trails crisscrossed that same space in an amazing pattern of man-made technological beauty. It dawned on me that a century ago, people weren’t lucky enough to see vapor trails in the morning light before they drifted off in the wind.

As I got in the car and drove uptown to meet my dad, my dreams became vapor trails too.

Technically Speaking

Are we doomed? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Technology is a great thing … except when it’s not. The question, I suppose, is trying to figure out when we’ve gone too far. Even harder is admitting it.

Personally, I should be livid with the advent of the digital camera, because even though I’m a professional photographer and I take advantage of all the advances in photo technology, the digital camera basically cost me my job.

I became expendable when it became clear that any Tom, Dick, or Harry off the street could buy a digital camera and take a good picture … when I say “good” I mean one that is properly exposed (let’s face it, there are a lot of folks out there toting around thousand dollar Canons and Nikons who still have no sense of light or composition).

What I’m saying is if photographers still had to buy film, meter the light, set the camera properly and then process the film and print the pictures in a darkroom … well, newspapers most likely would still be flourishing instead of disappearing, and it would actually take a fair amount of effort to get all that crap on the Internet (Bye-bye YouTube, so long Facebook!)

Then along came the technological advances in the cell phone market. Soon, it too could take properly exposed, high-resolution images - and videos! The number pad soon morphed into an actual keyboard so people could now text each other rather than … talk.

Huh?

Before long, it became a “smart phone" which pretty much does everything except act as an actual phone. I'm not sure if people actually even talk on them anymore, but they're a great way to connect to the Internet, play games, figure out where the hell you were, or tell you how much you should tip at a restaurant. We've become App crazy! (About the only thing a smart phone can't do, apparently, is save the life of the guy who invented it.) Now there is an App that lets you actually ask your phone a question and some woman named Siri will gladly answer it for you.

Really?

It got me to thinking. Maybe standing in line for hours on end to get the latest version of an iPhone isn’t the best use of our time - or our money. Maybe it’s time we stepped back a little. Maybe pull out a board game or an actual book instead of a Kindle. Let's give our thumbs a break for a while. Maybe even speak to each other face to face for a minute or two. Maybe we should think about how we're going to describe our generation to our grandchildren. (Assuming, of course, our kids will still choose sex over the latest App, and our increasingly fat asses will live long enough to even see grandchildren).

I can hear our stories now. Long gone will be the uphill 5-mile treks to school and back in a foot of snow like we heard from our grandparents. Instead we’ll be telling our grandchildren how rough we had it way back in the day when we had to fire up the microwave oven for a whole minute before we could eat. We'll lament about how our televisions were a whopping three inches thick and the high definition screens were only the size of a small car, and we had to push buttons on something called a remote control to change the channels!

We'll tell them about how sometimes we actually would have to pry our lazy asses off the couch so we could get into our cars and drive up to a window at something called a bank to get money so we could drive up to another window to get food, and occasionally we would even have to drive to some place called an “instant oil change joint” where we would sit in our cars while lesser men than us worked underneath us in a dark pit below the engine to keep them running. (It’s amazing the self-serve pump ever caught on since it’s about the only thing we do for ourselves anymore.)

Still, I'm a little confused because I'm not quite sure which generation I belong to. I guess I’m a "tweener" of sorts. I’m part of the old, but also part of the new. I can remember things from my childhood that needed to technologically advance if we were to survive. Things like the 8-track player which inevitably cut your favorite song in half from one track to the next, forcing you to wait five, maybe 10, seconds for the song to resume on the next track. Or my personal favorite, the lawn darts game called Jarts. I’m pretty sure those who actually survived playing Jarts were left scratching their heads as to how such an amazingly stupidly thought out game, where the players basically try to skewer each other with gigantic darts tossed aimlessly through the air from a distance of 20 or so feet, could have ever been invented in the first place. (Oddly, Jarts seems to have morphed into the popular tailgating game with the unfortunate name of “Cornhole” where beanbags are tossed at targets rather than heavy, pointed metal missiles).

Of course, some of the new inventions and trends from this generation are just as stupid. There are a lot of tatooed kids walking around right now who are going to be second-guessing themselves 20-years down the road when their barbed wire biceps sag and wrinkle, or their tramp stamps ... well, I don't even want to go there. And right at the top of the list, at least my list, is the mind-numbing smart phone. Is it really making our lives that much better? I mean their addictive powers have people crashing their cars, walking into street poles and mall fountains, and basically ignoring all life forms around them.

Why celebrate a victory when you can check out your phone? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

If that wasn't bad enough, smart phones are ruining my photos too! It seems that every time I take a picture of a crowd at a sporting event going crazy after an amazing play, there are always three or four expressionless people in the crowd looking down at their damn phones. It's like they're completely oblivious to what just happened on the field, or the fact that they’re at a game, or maybe even outside! And it’s not just the crowd. The other night I was shooting a basketball game when I noticed one of the young photographers down the row from me also had his head down staring at his phone, thumbs a blazing. Thank God there wasn’t a loose ball flying out of bounds in his direction or he would have been creamed, unless, of course, his phone was smart enough to put up a protective shield.

I can only imagine the lengths this technology might take us. Soon people will be podcasting their own funerals so that no one really has to travel to pay their respects. And when the funeral is over, I fully expect a lot of folks will choose to be buried with their smart phones. This will, of course, lead to an increase in the age old (and technologically absent) art form of grave robbing, as hordes of cash-strapped iAddicts will grab up their shovels, head for the boneyard, and try to pry the latest Droid from the rigor mortis grip of the freshly deceased before the battery dies.

Oh well, at least they’ll be getting some exercise.

Legacy Redefined

Not the ending Joe Paterno envisioned. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

It wasn’t a great week to be a college football fan. In light of the Penn State football sex scandal that gets more incredibly vile by the minute, it wasn’t even a great week to be a human being.

Heads are rolling this morning, most notably legendary coach Joe Paterno’s, after his former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky’s brutal, sexual tirades on underprivileged youths were finally unearthed after years of what appears to be a massive coverup by the university, the local police, or anyone else who seemed too chicken shit to stand up against the football powerhouse PSU, and take the side of the innocent boys who were allegedly preyed upon by Sandusky.

Penn State students rioted last night when they found out Paterno had been fired. A television van was flipped, rocks were thrown through windows, and it looked for all the world like another Kent State circa 1970 was about to happen when Mother Nature moved in and sprayed the crowd with a cold, driving rain, doing what the riot police’s pepper spray couldn’t – send everyone home.

It was ugly, but there was no way this thing was ever going to have a pretty ending. If the board of trustees had left everything as it were and kept Paterno on until the end of the season, it would have just compounded the problem, festering the boil of public opinion that had so many talking heads spewing on and on about the topic.

They did what many folks, outside the PSU student body, considered the “right” thing to do - they fired him. They also fired university president Graham Spanier, but not then graduate assistant Mike McQueary, who walked in on Sandusky allegedly sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in the football facility showers in 2002.

McQueary's actions, or inactions, also have created a big stir in the office of public opinion. His initial response was to run away from the scene in disbelief before calling his father for advice. His father advised him to tell coach Paterno about what he witnessed, which he did. Paterno then told the PSU Athletic Director Tim Curley who relayed it to Spainer, but with each successive leap up the chain of command, somehow the information fell victim to a grown up version of the telephone game where “sodomy” morphed into “horsing around.”

Sports radio hosts, their callers, Internet chatters, and just about everyone else is lambasting McQueary for not doing more. “If I were him (McQueary), I would have beat Sandusky to within an inch of his life,” seems to be a popular response from many callers or online commenters who have responded on the topic.

The truth is, none of us really know how we would react in that situation. It’s easy with hindsight on our side to say how we think we’d react, but we don’t really know. I’m pretty sure Mike McQueary never asked for any of this to happen to him, just like Sandusky’s alleged victims never asked to be sodomized in a Penn State football facility shower.

“Why didn’t he go to the police?” “Why didn’t he stop it?” People want to know. The righteous are pissed, and maybe deservedly so, but why don’t battered women leave their husbands? Why don’t people leave their shitty jobs?

It’s never as cut and dried as we’d like it to be, and suddenly we’re all experts on the situation, even when we’re far removed from it.

Early this morning, TV crews were on Paterno’s doorstep looking for his reaction. It seems as if Paterno has been itching to talk, but his attorneys haven’t let him say much of anything. His wife was at his side as he briefly addressed the crowd of reporters and students gathered at his doorstep still not saying much of anything. She looked horrified and confused. Much of the country feels the same way.

It’s hard to say what’s going on in Paterno’s mind. For the past several years the popular belief has been that Joe Pa hasn’t really been running the football program anyway, he’s just their figurehead, their messiah – a grandfatherly figure to everyone at the school, football player or otherwise.

Maybe he didn’t know the full context of what was going on, but if it turns out he did (and we may never know) then the people in State College, and the rest of the country for that matter, will have lost a lot of faith in human kind, and Happy Valley won’t be very happy at all.

Getting There

Welcome to Anamosa, Iowa. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Maybe it was the sun beating on the side of my head. Maybe I was trying too hard. Maybe the vista was too dead this time of year. I’m not sure, but whatever it was that was keeping me from finding it, it was pissing me off.

Some people drink to find it. Some people take drugs. Not me. I take an eight-hour road trip to Iowa to find it. But dammit, this time it wasn’t working.

The mental peace I get from driving long distances by myself can be intoxicating. It’s a chance for me to unleash my brain and let it roam without interruption. I don’t even try to rein it in, I just make sure to cool it down and wipe it off before I put it back in the stable. But no amount of radio flipping or CD playing was doing the trick. My mind wasn’t wandering. I wasn’t getting there. I was irritated, not calm, and to make matters worse, my cruise control had gone belly up and now my ass was starting to throb with four more hours of highway staring me in the face.

Shit.

Normally the bowels of northwestern Indiana don’t bother me much, but this was different. Now I was wishing I’d have flown to Iowa. If not for thoughts of Buddy Holly and Richie Valens smoldering in a cornfield, I might have.

Double shit.

I became depressed. And why not? Who else could derive pleasure from driving to Iowa? Now I was just like everyone else, slugging along expressionless, mile after dead straight mile on westbound I-80, just like Henry Ford intended, but Iowa came quicker than I expected. I guess I was going faster than I thought. I had been banking on a third of the day behind the wheel, but when I arrived in Cedar Rapids early in the afternoon, only six and a half hours had elapsed from the time I left Michigan.

I wasn't hungry because I’d already eaten lunch on the road, and my room wasn’t ready for check in either, so with an hour to kill and nothing to do I stood in the hotel lobby and looked blankly at the wall.

Triple shit.

The last thing I wanted to do was head back out on the road, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand there looking at the wall for another hour, so I put my luggage back in the car, pulled my cameras out of the trunk and headed east on the first country road I found. Maybe, I thought, just maybe I might be able to find my peace somewhere off the beaten path, or at the very least, a secluded spot where I could piss.

The road I chose was hilly and the corn was dead. Barely another car passed me as I continued east until I saw a sign for Jones County – birthplace of Grant Wood, the man who painted “American Gothic.”

This seemed promising. The last time I was in Cedar Rapids, I had driven to the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville and some amazing things had happened. I found it that day, that’s for sure. A few strolls through the magical corn rows in centerfield and I felt like a kid again, not to mention my car radio, which had been broken for two years, started working again the minute I left the parking lot. Maybe a visit to Grant Wood’s birthplace would fix my cruise control and save my ass seven-plus hours of agony on the trip home?

Local farmer's ode to Grant Wood. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

Wood was born just outside the town of Anamosa, about a half hour from Cedar Rapids. I pulled into Anamosa and drove around a bit. It was small and quaint, but it had the most amazing state penitentiary I’d ever seen. I pulled into a small parking lot in the middle of the town and began to stroll around on foot, stopping to photograph things that caught my eye – an old VW van painted with clouds, a ball diamond across the street from the slammer, and the prison itself, which was very old, but definitely occupied because I could hear the inmates through the open windows.

Their talking started to loosen my mind a bit. Who’d have thunk criminal chatter would have done the trick? But it did. Not the turn-your-brain-loose-for-hours-on-end deal like a road trip gave me, but it definitely got me to thinking about more than the normal, mundane this-is-your-lousy-middle-aged-life-stuck-in-a-major-rut bullshit I was used to.

I started thinking about Iowa criminals. Were they just as evil as Detroit criminals? Crime isn’t the first thing that pops into your head when you think about Iowa, after all … farmers and pheasants maybe, but certainly not murderers or rapists. But there they were; chatting away not 20-feet from my trespassing self on the other side of a concrete wall built in the late 1800’s.

I asked a lady raking leaves across the street what kind of prison it was. She told me it used to be minimum security, but it had changed and now there were some pretty bad people in there. I asked her if it freaked her out to live right across the street from the prison. She shrugged her shoulders as if she hadn’t really thought about it much. But I thought about it.

I thought about Grant Wood too. He’d painted “American Gothic” 81-years ago, but he may as well have painted it last week – at least in Anamosa. If Facebook, Twitter, smartphones and computer games have taken over most of America, they somehow glossed over Anamosa.

Old neighbors stood at the ends of their driveways shooting the shit and drinking beer out of a can. Their laughter echoed off the walls of boredom. It was the kind of laughter I remembered hearing from drunken adults in my own small hometown in Ohio when I was a kid – a raspy mix of filterless Camels and Pabst Blue Ribbon guffawing out of their cancerous lungs, stomachs and wind pipes. They might die tomorrow, but Goddammit, they’re having a hell of a good time right now.

One of the neighbors gave me a friendly wave as if to say, “Drop them cameras son and crack open a beer with us.” I waved back and nodded the universal nod that says, “You keep havin’ your fun, you don’t need any son-of-an-Ohio-redneck intrudin’ on your good time by suckin’ down your stash of liquid gold – but thanks anyway.”

The friendly neighbor acknowledged my nod and turned back to his crew at the end of the driveway. Up the street, a young girl and her brother were roller-skating up and down the sidewalk in front of their house. Every now and then a motorcycle would pass by, but for the most part it was quiet, except for the chatter of the prisoners that wafted out into the street through the open windows of the state pen.

If these walls could talk - Iowa State Penitentiary in Anamosa. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

After an hour or so it started to get dark, so I ended my brief excursion with rural America and headed back to Cedar Rapids. For the next day and a half I would switch gears and become a sports photographer at a major university. But I left Anamosa somewhat excited, because after eight hours on the road, my mind had finally switched on and I couldn’t wait for the drive home on Sunday.

The football game was a good one – nice and controversial with an exciting ending, but the one thing that stuck with me was how far off the weatherman was. A forecast of low 60’s and sunny skies gave way to a high of 39 with mid-day skies as dark as the bottom of a manhole cover. That was okay with me. I like gloomy skies and it never rained, so I didn’t particularly mind that I pretty much froze my balls off the entire duration of the game.

The other thing that stuck out about Saturday was that I left Cedar Rapids for Iowa City in the early morning dark, and I returned to Cedar Rapids in the evening dark. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worked from sunup till sundown, but I imagined there were a lot of folks in the state who could.

When Sunday morning arrived, it came with cloudy skies and 40 mph winds coming straight out of the south. Since I was driving due east, and Iowa’s cornfields don’t offer much in the way of protection from the elements, I knew this would make for some pretty interesting driving.

I decided to forego I-80, at least for a while, and take a road less traveled as I headed out of the state. It proved a wise decision. With little to no traffic, it didn’t really matter if a sudden wind gust blew me a little left of center since there was nothing for me hit head on but emptiness.

It was that emptiness that really hit home. I drove past field after field of dead, brown, bristly corn waving to me like the beer-swilling dude at the end of his driveway in Anamosa. I passed through small town after small town - each a carbon copy of the other – one gas station, a grain elevator, a pizza joint and a church, but not a human in sight. I half expected tumbleweed to be blowing down the street, but all I saw was an endless stream of freight trains, some a mile long I’ll bet, crawling parallel to my path heading westward, as if Manifest Destiny beckoned those coal carrying Conrails to a place where the grass was greener, and their payload burned cleaner.

The lines of the Iowa country road met the railroad tracks at the very same point well off in the distance. Maybe Grant Wood saw the same thing. Maybe every art teacher who ever taught perspective drawing stared out on the horizon from this exact spot in eastern Iowa, where all things come to a point on the horizon –roads, railroad tracks, cornfields, telephone lines ... and thoughts. They all started right there in front of me, just out of reach – always out of reach.

Off to the south the sun sliced through the clouds from time to time like a laser beam, blowing up distant silos in the middle of the fields with its bright beam of light that looked very much like an alien abduction was about to take place. When the sun hit my car, I wondered if some farmer looking out his window a mile away in that same field saw me in one of those same brilliant beams of light and found it just as amazing as I did? Or maybe he just kick off his shit-encrusted boots and poured himself a cup of Folger’s instant coffee without giving it so much as a second thought?

An epiheny? Or just a field? (Photo by Lon Horwedel)

It was that moment when I began thinking about my dead mother. I hadn’t missed my mom in a while, but I was really missing her now. I don’t think she’d ever even been to Iowa, but I felt like she was there, and when I say there, I mean inside my head.

I thought about my dad too. About how we don’t really have a whole hell of a lot to say to each other these days. Never really did. He’d been to Iowa plenty. He used to go pheasant hunting there every fall with his work buddies from Ford. I wondered if he’d ever traveled this same road, if he’d ever seen the brilliant shafts of sunlight blowing up the dead fields, or the railroad tracks and the highway coming to a point in the far off distance, or if he just slept the whole time while his buddies did most of the driving.

Whatever it was that had blocked my brain on the trip out, it had certainly been dislodged now.

“I gotta write some of this shit down.” I thought to myself. “There’s no frickin’ way I’m gonna remember all of this – hell, probably none of it.”

Everything seemed profound. Everything seemed real. My thoughts were flying around my brain so fast, I almost had to pull over. I was in mental overload. It was so overwhelming, I felt like I might actually cry and I had no idea why. Was it the corn? Was it the light? Was I happy? Was I sad?

Fuck if I knew?

I peeled off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. I put on my sunglasses even though it was mostly cloudy. Ten miles ahead was civilization. Before long, I’d be crossing the Mississippi River and leaving Iowa behind in the rear view mirror. The next exit was my southbound turn back to reality. Back to the painful cramp in my ass and the continual formation of a blood clot in the lower half of my right leg as I cruised eastward on I-80 with its semi-truck traffic and zoned-out-latte'-junkies texting themselves into the medians and ditches of the world on an otherwise perfectly clear, dry day.

Author on the road. (Photo by Lon Horwedel)