I manage to take a lot of private escapes in my life on a daily basis. People don’t know that, though some might suspect. I might work to 10 or 11 at night, or start at 5 in the morning and work weekends too in that frame of mind. When people reach me on the phone (I dread the phone and usually avoid being available by that means) and don’t want to talk to people or see anyone, people get the idea I am hiding from something to be so devoted to my work, but it’s not that way. I live 100 miles from my office and I commute once a week, stay one night, and return the next day on an optimal schedule, then work at home. The criticism is, “How can you commute so far??” and “Why don’t you take the highway???”
You see, when I leave the house at 5:30 in the morning, it is completely dark out. I keep my headlights off so as not to disturb the few neighbors whose bedroom windows are in the direct path of my headlights. I drive by silhouette of the moon – what light it might cast. At the end of our long driveway is a small solar light, dim but adequate. I use that illumination to keep my vehicle on track so as not to drop off into the ditch by the culvert. Then, I make my choices along the county roads as to when to switch on my headlights and even which road to take. I don’t want to disturb the elk in their habits. I would rather not startle them and make the cows and calves run for cover. I would rather they graze in peace. So, I avoid routes that go where I saw them last.
Halfway down the mountain, I turn off the main road onto a long winding road that no one takes because it eventually turns into a one-lane dirt road and people think it is not maintained, but it is. It’s often full of pot holes, washboards, sometimes great boulders fall onto the road but it always gets cleared by some remote grader operator. I increase my concentration to include all my surroundings, especially analysis of the steep slopes of decomposing granite and packed snow in anticipation of a slide due to freeze-thaw effect. The main reason for this diversion is The River.
For an hour of my commute twice a week, I drive along the South Platte River, first going downstream along the South Fork, then across a bridge at the confluence with the North Fork, and then upstream along the North Fork of the South Platte until I reach Foxton Canyon where the road is paved and climbs through a steep meander of wealthy people’s hideaway mansions. Along this route I listen to my iPod singing loudly to myself. I regularly see deer, elk, wild turkeys, and feral horses – mustangs set loose by an odd, out-of-the-mainstream bearded guy who might scare you if you saw him on the road. There are very few people I meet along the way and the ones I do meet, I see time and time again with only a hand gesture to acknowledge our mutual existence along the way.
I have picked up hitch hikers. I have stopped to help hurt animals. Sometimes, I stop and watch a foam line in an eddy to see if trout are rising and if it is on the way home, I fish. I stop to watch the sun rise. I stop to smell the rain or listen to the silence and feel the wind. In some cases, I need to stop to pee in my business suit with my polished pumps and expensive coat and gloves and hair so perfect leaving behind only the footprints of a business woman on her way to work. I have wrangled wild geese who thought the road was a good place to sleep. I have jumped out to chase a glimpse of a disappearing bear. I have prayed and cried and worked out my life plan over and over and over again on that route, as each event unfolds in the office or phone call or email that reach me when I am plugged in. I digest my world and come up with solutions. When I get a break in the day, like during a paper section plotting or when the computer is installing updates, or I just finished edits to legacy data and am mentally exhausted, I write my commute-derived thoughts down for a blog and upload a picture. Then, I look to the mountain where I will turn at the end of the day to head home.
I am not a work-aholic. I am an escape artist.
{ 2 } Comments
Thanks for the reminder of the importance of escaping. Although, I think I need a longer commute! However, I have found a route that has more farms to look at and fewer office buildings.
Way to go! Out of the way is the way to go! Way out! When I am on the highway, that concrete slab seems to alienate me from my ancestral roots. First, the glaciers retreated. The slough-off from that event made a plains for grasses and trees to grow for critters (big Pleistocene ones with hair and horns and thick skin) to roam. Then, some time flew by, the Holocene was upon us. I don’t know which came first, the woman looking for a new mall or looking for a lost dog, but the men followed her across the Bering Strait (or by boat across the Atlantic some heretics now speculate) and we arrived in Colorado (skip skip skip a few long stories here…) Some Utes followed the elk in the plains. Homesteaders settled that situation. Turf-busters and wagon-wheel marks arrived. This led to roads, territories, states and counties. Now, big slabs of concrete run across the plains and up through the mountain corridors like rivers of rock and a lot of people drive on them. I can’t go there. My car slides off and the people shake their fingers at me (the middle one). Take the long way! I think I wrote a blog a while back about the road less traveled by and how dangerous that choice can be and how many times I have prayed to find my way back to the road more traveled by. Never pass an opportunity to find out where the dirt road goes… you, Andrea, are on the right track. A two-wheeled one.
Post a Comment