Causeway -> Heart -> Log -> Aisle

by Sal Bleeker

My discman sputtered out before I reached Electric Ladyland, before I’d even cast my hang-ups over the seaside. I had no choice but to recalibrate my ears to the hum of illuminated billboards lining the road at long intervals: LOVE YOUR BABIES: BORN & UNBORN. NEED HELP? 1-800-395-HELP. LAST GOOD CUP FOR MILES. 4 1/2 MILES ON THE LEFT. By removing my headphones I was made aware of the gummy swamp air on my neck, of the gnats congregated around the billboard lights, of this place, no place actually, an isolated road cutting through wetlands to the airport. A little after dusk the sky still reddish and hazy, I could just make out the silhouette of a six-story car garage up ahead. I must be near the airport, I thought. I’d been walking for about two hours, my progress checked by the relentless stream of tractor trailers whose right of way I was obliged to acknowledge, abandoning the road for the soggy grasses to the side. They blared their horns as they approached and as they hurtled past, as a reproach, as if to say, “This is no place for an evening stroll.” No, nothing to see and take in along this silt and coal ash filled causeway.

If I had to compare this place to one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I’d choose Clarice, a place that reconstitutes itself from its very ruins, but an unsettled place. An unsettled place is a rare, special place is it not? Huge swaths of the country share this peculiar quality of being unsettled and purposeful. Lonely roads laid over swamps, mountains or deserts with no discrimination, colonized by glowing billboards. And not just roads leading to and from airports. You also get the precise feeling of being anywhere in former warehouse districts repurposed as corporate bazaars. Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, San Diego, what’s the difference? A square mile of Home Depot, Target, Best Buy and Ikea has nothing to do with the city it is circumscribed by, it transcends the function of a city. But I really see these places, I can’t not see them, although they try their best to be pure ideas. I see the little slivers of grass between highways and their retaining walls. Hopelessly abstract little islands of green, they almost look habitable. I’d clear off the detritus from the road and take real good care of them. I’d husband those slivers of nonroad, those odd triangles of futile longing for the lawn, for habitation, for home. What planner decided to leave in a tiny slice of hope? And why grass? Why not lavender? I suppose these scattered slices of lawn remind long-suffering commuters that they too tend a little piece of subdivided earth, and they take heart.

Preparing to camp for the night I wondered, where are my comrades? Safely tucked away I presume. Our rugged culture heroes aside, Americans are a decidedly indolent, pampered multitude. And though the frontier ethos lives on in rhetoric, one is always within striking distance of a Taco Bell, a Starbucks and an Econo-Lodge. But I was traveling lower than low budget. I’d sooner sleep in the bushes than fold my lanky frame over chairs in a perpetually lit, thrumming airport lobby. Besides, airport workers are trained to eye me like a terrorist or a drug smuggler. I should have eaten earlier. The moisture clinging to everything was cooling. It was cooling on my skin and my body temperature was dipping in accordance with its own rhythm. I thought, I’d like to lay down now. I’d like to walk into the road, lay my head down on the road, press my ear to the asphalt, and listen for a deep rumbling in the earth… I peeled myself off of the road and into the brush beside the road. I hadn’t eaten since noon and I was a bit dehydrated. I stepped over some brush and then through the trees, squishing wet grasses under my feet. I stumbled on a downed log, a good place as any to crash. I laid my jacket down over the damp grasses and collapsed next to the log.

Seated by the aisle, I dozed lightly knowing that the flight attendants had only an inch of clearance on either side to push their pitiful carts past as they offered sodas. Exhausted from sleeping rough, rocks in the spine. Soda, soda, soda. The idiotic word soda, and the blind faith in soda. The crisp pop of a carbonated beverage being opened, the muffled pop of a dud. Baseball, Wall Street, soda, soda. I must have slept in a clump of weeds last night. I smelled like big fern weeds, the kind of weeds we thought were wiped out when we laid down concrete and sod, those big fern weeds that blight everything they touch, that grow back twice as high when they’re cut down. Seated next to me, a woman bobbed her baby up and down. The baby had a winning smile and the woman, tall, composed, fresh from a good night’s rest, was itching to chat. She told me the baby, a good-natured little blob, had a penchant for rap music, and she told me other particulars of her typical existence which I responded to kindly and tactfully: a conversation. I even took out a little thumb piano and plucked the keys for the baby, old Uncle Sal. In the presence of this little family, Mom and Baby and Grandmom to Mom’s right, I felt strangely at peace, chatting away. For a moment, cocooned with the other cargo on this passenger jet lifting us literally out of the swamp and into clear skies I thought, maybe I’ll settle down, have a family. What kind of a man is so driven by impulse that he burns through his meager resources before he’s even gotten off the ground, reduced to sleeping in the foliage off of the road to the airport? What kind of an abject creature would husband a sliver of highway median and not a household? A prodigal, profligate man that dwells in neglected spaces, that admires the pigeon and knows how many stray cats are put down each day. As I touched on before, I hadn’t eaten and I hadn’t really slept. My nerves were keyed from all the sodas popping off. Each muffled burst represented in my mind the petty aspirations of a multitude of meritless, web-footed, complacent nothings sucking on sodas like spoiled children at snack time, without any sense of purpose or meaning or decency. Rabble, I thought, rabble with syrupy, muffled aspirations. Hah, I was on a righteous motherfucking tear. Abruptly the baby spat onto my pant leg. I wiped the white milky substance up with my hand and assured the mother that it was nothing. But she insisted on patting my leg down with a burping rag, really rubbing my leg vigorously with the rag, come to think of it. Recall that I had slept in a marsh last night. By no means had the innocent baby spoiled my spotless attire. Here I was being patted, caressed and rubbed down with maternal affection by an attractive woman with large, manicured hands, just as I had been alternately cursing and pining for the comforts of a home life, unwisely contrasted with the occasional indignities that an itinerant endures as a matter of course. “A little milk on the pants is nothing,” I insisted awkwardly. I must have looked uncomfortable. Grandmom intervened and the two had a heated conversation in a Slavic tongue. Finally Grandmom blurted, “You look like her dead brother. Here, picture, loooook.” I did resemble the thin, bearded man in the photo. I was taken aback, and I understood how the woman had scrubbed my leg so gratuitously without a shred of self-consciousness, since I could have passed for her dear brother. My mouth was dry and my eyes were heavy. I wanted a Coke. A coke, at that moment, transcended my inner strife. I looked back down the aisle and, sure enough, a flight attendant was easing her cart through the cramped aisle.