Driving

Car Crash

Yours will happen some dark night
On the long road from a family visit–
Perhaps when the planets next align
As they did last night: Mercury, Venus,
Mars, moon, Saturn, Jupiter–
Or when the sun is bright,
And you admire someone’s azaleas
Or catch a colorful line of wash
Blowing in the breeze.
Suddenly, you’re in a ditch,
Images swirling at the backs of your eyes.

I will be coming home from work
Scribbling fast to trap some phrase
About to slip through the sieve of memory:
Writing “fiddleheads of fern,”
Or today, “The Car Crash,”
When I looked up to face
Head-on, lights and sirens blaring,
A prophetic ambulance.
They will find me grinning by the side of the road,
A pencil clutched in my hand.

It is an understatement to say I do a lot more driving than I did before I changed jobs 18 months ago. Theoretically, I telework two days a week, but no week is the same. Today, for example, I drove 240 miles to present a 2.5-hour workshop.

In July 2006, I bought a new car for the new job, and five weeks later, hit a deer with it. More accurately, the deer slammed into me. I now have over 41,000 miles on this car, and I estimate that I have spent $4500 on gasoline in the last year and a half just to get to and from my office three days a week (not to mention traveling around the state).

The poem is not new, but I think of it sometimes on my travels. Mostly, I can ignore how vulnerable I am on the freeway around Atlanta and the highways of rural Georgia. (As Wally says, “Isn’t it terrible what we can get used to?”) Occasionally, the full impact of my lifestyle flashes clearly in my mind, and I have a strong desire to stop the madness–not to mention the violence I am doing to the planet.

For now, I will continue to do what I have to do in order to do work I love. And now is all we have, after all.

Change of Habit

“Yep, son, we have met the enemy, and he is us.”  ~Pogo

[Here I had copied the Pogo comic strip/Earth Day poster, 1971, from Wikipedia-see it here.]

I have just returned from three days at the Okefenokee Swamp, home of the beloved Pogo. Alligators basked in their muddy depressions on the peat “blow-ups”, great egrets and white ibises sailed over the cypress trees, and a tannin-colored wake followed our tour boat on Billy’s Lake. The Swamp is a National Wildlife Refuge now, but a logging company stripped most of the oldest cypress growth in the early 1900s.

Yet life abounds in this swamp, and I was reminded of the restorative properties of being outdoors. So why did I spend so many hours indoors in our cabin–knitting, playing Rummikub, and sitting with friends? Because part of my objective was rest and change of habit, taking a break from the usual. That I did. Now I want to find the entire run of “Pogo” and read it as an adult!