The Drive and the Tree

I've been looking for adventure lately. My feet have been all itchy, as they say, and I've felt a need to just go--somewhere, anywhere, right now, just for the day, or forever. I decided to go to Chicago to see some of my favorite bands at Pitchfork Music Festival. My friend Eric wanted to come too, and so because doing things with your friends is fun, and because splitting gas is much cheaper, I thought this was a good idea. But the achy wanderlust inside me was looking for something different than Chicago for a weekend with a friend. I'm not exactly sure what. It has not been sated.

Fortunately, it was appeased for the moment, at least, today, in the car. I drove most of the way home from Chicago. I drove for six of the eight and a half hours. Eric wanted to drive but I asked if I could just keep driving. I didn't mean to drive all the way home. I didn't mean to start listening to country music, forcing Eric to ask to use my headphones. I didn't mean to make him sigh awkwardly for hours, as he repeatedly jammed my headphones further into his ears.

I started listening to The Wreckers, which aren't really country (because The Wreckers are a duo which includes Michelle Branch, and how can Michelle Branch really be country?). But they are faux-country enough to give me the itch, and soon I was listening to Taylor Swift and Katrina Elam and Big & Rich and every song that I ever loved the summer I turned 18, the first summer I loved a boy, the summer that I think of when I think of innocence and freedom and beautiful summery youth. I relived summer love and summer adventures and summer road trips. I remembered horse camping (and horseflies) and swimming at the lake (and sunburns) and driving fast in a pickup with no air conditioning on backwoods dirt roads (and getting stuck, and having to walk out for help). I sang along, loudly, and missed my childhood just a little, and called the boy I loved the summer I turned 18 and left him a message saying I would never take a summer road trip with loud country music playing without thinking of him.

The voiceless pressure inside my chest that prompts me to pick up a backpack or a suitcase and just go has not been silenced (it is very loud for something without a voice). But the driving, the remembering, of today, has comforted it. I was reminded of where I have come from; it is important to remember where you have come from when you are deciding where you are going.

Today I was driving too fast, what with the sunshine and the music and the remembering. I was speeding through Iowa, and the sky was so blue, and the fields were so green. There was a hill along the right side of the road, and there was a big, black, dead tree on it, silhouetted against the blue, blue sky and the green, green fields. It was a beautiful tree, a perfect mass of leafless branches in stark wintery glory. I marveled at the beauty of the tree, and was passing it before I realized that it is not winter. Why was such a perfect tree so utterly dead? Why did this tree only look leafless and dormant, not dead? It must have been dead. This seemed to me to be a bad omen.

I began to assess what the tree might be telling me. At that moment I had been thinking of going to the park when I got home to visit a tree (coincidentally) that I like; should I not go there? Was the tree telling me that I was about to get in a car accident? Was it saying that I should be more considerate of the person I was driving with, and change the music and let him drive? I weighed all of these options, and none seemed right. Suddenly I knew what the tree was saying: "You are about to see a police officer. How fast are you going? Take notice of your surroundings!" I was going 88 m.p.h. in a 70 m.p.h. zone. I slowed down. Less than a mile later I passed a cop.

I believe this was not a coincidence.

(Later I will blog about the many concerts I have been to lately. I will post pictures, and I will post pictures of my new house, which is nearly settled.)