DAY 20: Home

DELAND, FL | MONDAY, MARCH 29, 2010 – I am up early, five am, just sitting here in a canvas fold-out chair on a second-story sleeping porch, in the blackness of morning. The rain must have stopped finally. The trees are dripping. Everything is super saturated and like an old house with creaks, is dripping.

Two lights I can’t see are revealing a bit of a driveway and the street, Adelle St. The pavement is a dull greenish glimmer. I see it as a cutout of dim light, through the silhouetted trunks of live oaks and palm fronds.

I am home again. Another place I no longer live but carry with me. Maine, where in many ways the roadtrip began, was my first home, is the soil I grew up on, where some of my bloodline goes back ten generations to the 1600s, to 1637 on Richmond Island.

Home. Adrienne and I are staying with an old friend of mine in a house he is caretaking for. A two minute walk would take me through the back yard of an old neighbor, to the cottage that is still mine, that I spent years fixing up, bringing back to life from a fire. But it’s rented out now. Later we’ll go by. The tools we’re here for, to ferry back to Seattle for work, are in the garage, hanging from nails on the unfinished walls. Saws and rope, monkey wrenches, clippers, old skates and license plates - all of it nestled between heartpine studs, and between studs with eaten away ends, married to fresher studs that touch down to the sill plates.

Florida reared up suddenly after all the days on the road. I haven’t even mentioned in any detail the time we spent in Maine with my parents, with Josh and Dorian and their two girls in Manhattan, my older sister and her family in DC.

A person begins by imagining a story. Then he begins by telling it as best he can. Holding up the tiny told against everything unspoken, it becomes clear that the story is silhouette. Everything undone. Done, experienced. But not yet accounted for. Not yet woven in.

Sitting here on this porch, I am picturing again all the faces of the people we have met so far along the way. Those faces, photographs of them, could be the story alone. It is so difficult just to ask: Can I take your picture? But I was taught once to ask that, and have asked plenty of times. But not the pencil-thin impish waitress at the 24-hour diner Waffle House the other day. I didn’t ask her, not any time she passed by, telling Adrienne and I quick odd stories in her drawl - lonely, stoic, bright. Not my older sister, in all our five and a half days at her house, eating, talking, running, laughing. Not my brother, back in Maine. Not the motel owner at Woodbine, who was making casa dias, India-style he said. The motel entry, as I came in from the night asking about a room, was thick with garlic and ginger smell, and other spices I could never name.

The story is always unfinished, a fraction, stones from a beach. Everyone knows this.

After Savannah, full, healed, we made a beeline for Florida. And still it came faster than we expected. We got on the highway. And I haven’t driven highways, not really, not with any regularity for two years. For two years I’ve been bicycling to work and to school, out at night.

So, the people on the highways, they drove like animals. An eighteen wheeler forced a car nearly off the road before the truck driver looked down from his cab thru one of eight mirrors and noticed and veered back into his lane. Cars hurtled by us, cutting between cars with no room for anything unexpected. Construction barrels went on forever, narrowing the path to two lanes between concrete dividers. No room for miles for a car to break down and pull over out of this rush that amounted to savings of seconds at best, maybe a half-hour over an entire day. Strange how things change. That high speed lane is no longer mine, seems ugly and empty. I remember driving that way, keeping the needle pinned to 9.5 mph over the speed limit at all costs, chasing it for thousands of miles.

Coming into DeLand, by back road again, on Route 11 up in DeLeon Springs, we passed all the valencias, the last oranges of the season, still on the tree. The same trees are already in bloom again, too, bearing tiny white flowers among the oranges and the greasy dark leaves, for next year’s fruit. I couldn’t actually see the flowers. But their nectar poured in through Yellow Truck’s vents.

We talked yesterday, Adrienne and me and Dave, at the kitchen table for hours, talking and leafing through books Dave had in a cardboard box. Rockwell Kent. Helen Levitt. Horizon. The American Farmhouse. So on and so on. I made coffee with the coffeemaker Adrienne and I brought with us on the road. We laughed and talked and by 10 Adrienne and I were in bed. Adrienne pulled the door to the sleeping porch ajar, so the sound of the rain came in.

             Adrienne and I outside Woodbine, GA, closing in on DeLand