Funny how serendipity works. Of course serendipity works funny, or else it wouldn’t be serendipity. It would be just regular dipity, or destiny, and regular destiny isn’t as much fun as serendipity.
This morning, the morning after Christmas, and a Sunday to boot, I woke up late. When you have Christmas on a Saturday, it feels like Sunday. So it’s like two Sundays in a row. I don’t like Sundays, but I do like Christmas.
I had plans for the day. I would go work out at my mega health club with the rows of giant TV’s, then I’d go to a new Bohemian coffee shop I discovered in the city. Before I left the house that morning, I went over to my dictionary, closed my eyes, flipped some pages, and landed on my destiny word for the day: ‘privilege.’ Shit, I didn’t want to see that word. It meant I was somehow privileged and should be grateful. I already had an overdose of gratitude from Christmas and Thanksgiving.
I got on the road and drove toward my megagymnasium. Then I would drink lattes and write. Blah blah blah. All that dull routine. I felt like a bowling ball bowled by an eleven-year-old boy on his first time out: in the gutter over and over again. But on I went. The idea occurred to me to just get on the road and drive out of the city.
But the voice in my head said: Nah, too risky. Turn left. Turn left! it shouted as I passed by the health club.
Well, we’ll go into the city then, to that coffee shop. C’mon. You haven’t written in a few days. Guilt. My voice could always motivate me that way.
Turn right. Turnnn righttt! Ohhh noo. What will we do!? What will we do!?
I passed the Wilson Avenue exit on the expressway, and the Irving Park Road exit.
My conscience tried one last time to get me to turn, onto Ontario—
Babes. And Pumpkin and spice lattes, it sang.
But by then, the voice had weakened and I would no longer listen to it. That’s the funny thing about guilt: the more you listen to it, the louder it gets. The less you listen to it, the fainter it becomes.
I was on my way – on the River that’s Not a Road, I-55 – that spreads across the belly of Illinois southwest to St. Louis. In the December sun, the road lit up like quicksilver. It was my highway.
December 26th is close to its relative, December 21st, the shortest day of the year. And I hadn’t left the house until 12:30. So I had little daylight. I had no overnight clothes, no hiking gear. No money. But I didn’t let the worry turn me back. I just drove on, with a hot chocolate in my right hand, singing I Am the Highway by Audioslave.
Of course, day after Christmas, lots of people are rushing back home to St. Louis or wherever after visiting family or whorehouses in Chicago. I received another shard of inspiration: Get off the damn interstate and cruise down a county highway.
“Okay,” I told my inspiration, “Will do.” I pulled off at the next exit, to Towanda, because the name reminded me one of my favorite places, Towaoc on the Ute Mountain Reservation in southwest Colorado, but mostly because it was the next exit. I had no idea where I headed. I couldn’t very well count on nature to inspire me. I couldn’t hike in the middle of a Midwestern winter since I had no gear, and since central Illinois has a lot of sky, but less than the average number of national parks. I drove west, into the wintering cornfields which slept beneath a fresh blanket of soft snow.
I sign said Lake Bloomington. I followed the sign, but then got lazy and figured it didn’t matter where I ended up. Somehow, I stumbled into the fingery Lake Bloomington, and into the Easter Seal Lodge on the lakeshore. A sign said to stop in at the camp office, but there weren’t any tracks leading into the camp, which consisted of a series of vacant cabins and outbuildings on a wooded shore. I drove into the deserted lodge compound which sprawled over 20 acres or so. The parking lot had one other vehicle, a pickup with two days snow still on the windshield. In the back, I had my favorite hiking shoes, my old Nikes with the soles peeling off the bottoms. I slipped them on, zipped up my one Christmas present, a cotton pullover from my nephew, Andy, and the pair of cheap, lined gloves I’d bought at a truck stop a few miles back. Along with my leather jacket, turtleneck, and my sleek sunglasses, all in black, I felt more like a Swiss hitman in The Bourne Identity than a hiker in central Illinois.
I sloshed through the cake-icing snow down to the shore, scattering a bevy of white tail deer on the way. Their hoof prints were everywhere in the slippery snow. The sky held without a cloud today. And Lake Bloomington glimmered like one white sheetcake. Who knew how thick the ice was beneath the snow? The icy wind drove me back into the woods, and I climbed a bluff about 20 feet above shoreline. Animal tracks bisected the serpentine lake in two, from shore to shore. Another two sets, to the left and to the right of the main tracks, merged at 40-degree angles to the main path, forming a giant peace sign. Maybe the dear were against the Iraq war, too. Herbivores make better pacifists. I stepped down to the shoreline and saw they weren’t deer tracks. Could be fox or coyote, maybe a dog.
The sun turned the snow crystals on the long white lake into a gem field that glittered beneath a powder blue sky. The wind stopped. A moment still and pristine. Only a far-off dog and the distant report of a skeet shoot disturbed the Christmas postlude.
On the far shore, a long thicket of winter willow veiled the farm fields beyond. Farther down the shore, I spotted twin masts from an old clipper ship. Hmmm. This Lake Bloomington may be bigger than I thought. I wandered through the woods, past a large communal lodge boarded up for the winter, with an office chair paired with a Weber grill out front, and a Trading Post manned by a Coke machine. I crossed a field of snow. Sequestered in the woods near shore, the clipper masts turned out to be tree-sized climbing equipment: a footbridge between the two poles, wooden monkey bars, an aerial obstacle course. They must put these Easter Seal kids through their paces and then draft them into the Marines. Farther off, stands of tall spruce pines wholly out of place in the middle of Illinois.
I wandered toward the incongruity of the pine forest and entered it. The needles scattered the seemingly undilutable light from the falling sun. Through the endless needles the sun weakened and fell to murk on the forest floor. It seemed like the inside of a church at midday, with the light peeking through the stained-glass clerestory. The thin pines brewed a brooding, dark majesty, and a sacredness as they permitted light through their gracile arches in abstemious measure. The high green canopy, tasseled with snow, was my nave. A strange, snowy detritus fell from the crowns; snow dust, flowing endlessly down in tiny crisps from the dark treetops. The light pried open the darkness in a sloping shaft, marbling the thin pillars of the pines a burning rust.
I twisted my way through a mile or more of this cathedral. When I realized I’d lose light within an hour and still didn’t quite know how I’d arrived here, I traced my footfalls back.
I turned one more time toward Lake Bloomington, to its solitude, cold and bright. In the middle of the lake, a small ellipse had ponded where ice had yet to form, and the sun ignited the ice in fire so dazzling I couldn’t really look long. Closer to shore, a thin sheet of snow barely concealed the ice faults, tiny ridges that slept like bony legs under its blanket. I remembered my dictionary word from this morning. I’d gone out fully unprepared, on inspiration, not planning on what I had found. I stumbled into it. If I’d gone out and did what I’d planned, I’d have sold myself out to monotony.
Privilege was defined by my dictionary as a benefit conferred on a person beyond the advantages of most. I had been privileged. I felt like I’d had the whole State of Illinois, all of Lake Bloomington, and mostly, the still and virgin expanse of this moment, to myself.
As I headed back north toward Chicago on old I-55, the River that’s Not a Road, I sung along, again and again, to the refrain from Audioslave’s I Am the Highway. I pulled in at a rest stop and watched the last of the sun fall below a flat horizon, with a lone oak and an abandoned grain silo to frame its passing. I could see the orange ball move below the black line of land. I jumped back in my Blazer and headed on, looking in my rearview mirror as stray cirrus clouds gathered like angels’ wings in the astroglow. I preferred to head into the sun as it set. But a bright, russet moon rose large in the northeast, mirroring the ebbing light southwest.
You’re not my rolling wheels. You’re the whole highway. You’re not my winter moon. You’re the whole night now.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within