The day is rapidly drawing to an end and my family, grey already from the dusty trail, are becoming insubstantial and fading into the failing light. It is time to stop, and I am ready. I’m not used to riding this far. I am sore, hungry and tired. I am amazed that my grandfather, as old and frail as he is can endure such rude transport.
Thankfully, my uncle calls the party to a halt, and we begin slowly, stiffly and thankfully to dismount. Our horses give thanks too. They know that soon, they will be fully unburdened, rubbed down and fed and watered for the night. When it gets colder, my brothers and me will throw blankets on their backs.
Unspoken, each of us has a role and in a mime of activity a fire is soon made and food is on the fire. I scavenge for firewood with my cousin, and the smell of wood smoke and meat and onions makes my guts roil. I am still young but feel the tiredness in my body. Grandpa, who is still old, sits cross-legged in front of the fire with a horse blanket over his shoulders, a thousand yard stare in his tranquil black eyes.
He is a full blood Indian, Cherokee.
Our people are ‘civilized’, yet grandpa still speaks Iroquois. Some of my uncles are full blood too, but more and more in these later generations we are dilute and mixed. Once, like the mighty Bison that grazed this fertile plain, our numbers were many. Nowadays, like the Bison, we are fading into an obscure twilight.
The fire that gave us warmth and food is now a glowing orange pile that renders constellations of sparks skyward when fed new wood. We are replete, our stomachs and eyelids heavy as we approach the favorite hour. The men folk pass the bottle, and the amber fire lubricates parched throats. Starting with desultory exchanges about the day, the road, the goal, it settles soon into a familiar cadence, rising with the volatile spirit, the talkers vying to be heard and acknowledged are anticipating the time when grandpa stirs, and his voice brings silence to this fiery circle.
Soon enough the basso chorus wanes and our horses champ stamp and snort quietly behind our heads, and then it is magic time.
Grandpa has lived a thousand years, and in that grizzled head the memory of our glorious past still burns with the vividness of yesterday. As he talks, incandescent sparks fly from his tongue and alight on the gathered family and ignite in each a dream of the past. While we are huddled in community against the cold on our shoulders, the abyssal sphere of the heavens rotates around our heads, as vivid and shiny as it was in the time when our people were young.
“This road was old when we were young, and when I was as old as Jonah ..
He has mentioned me by name, and such is the honor of this association that I am now a leading thread in this as yet unformed tapestry. As is Grandpas way, most of us will be named eventually and become a part of the warp and weft, but for now it is me they see as Grandpa as a young boy, and I am released from the breathless anticipation of inclusion.
“When I was as old as Jonah, 500 miles in a single day was easy. Our family could ride from coast to coast in five days. The automobiles that Nathan and Peter see today as dusty relics in museums were living breathing things that moved in migratory herds across this land. Our cities would be choked with them, purring, growling, honking, and inching forward a few feet at a time. It was a glorious sight – cars as far as the eye could see!”
Nathan and Peter are grinning and nudging each other, they are now part of the fabric, part of our favorite story.
Grandpa speaks, and to each of us alone, and although distinct and clear, his words are the fuel to a fire that ignites our collective imagination. We hear them in our ears, but now in our heads we ride in fabled Marques, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Jaguar and Triumph, our backs on seats of cloth and leather, our elbows nonchalantly propped on open window sills while we steer single handed to an uncertain promise, our hair tousled by the slipstream and our ears filled with the radio. We drive toward urgent, beckoning, hopeful futures. The road ahead a metric infinity that is devoured in effortless luxury and left behind in a raucous hydrocarbon fart. In this dark, chill night, the day is bright, and we have slipped the creeping gridlock and let loose our many horses.
Glorious days indeed, before the coming of the great thirst that left these fabulous chariots as rotting hulks along the wayside, alongside the bleached bones of the Bison whose path they followed. Rusting and unlovable carcasses that no matter how strong the desire will never again thrum with the fires of internal combustion.
Grandpa lived in a time when people would actually drive for no other reason than to drive. He worked in the factories where cars were made, before the time of fully robotic assembly, he knew what it was like to lie on his driveway on a weekend, under his car, giving it the love that was repaid in reliable starting and driving. He had been stranded on lonesome highways out of gas, or with a puncture. He had worked for the man to make the money that these cars consumed. Insurance, car payments, gas, maintenance – it was not just a way of life, it was a labor of love.
And in that compressive arc that is his story of the car, we are now in those desperate years that my father and uncles new, but were ended before I was born. Gasoline ran out, and the world forever changed. It is written in the stars overhead since so many more are now visible since the passing of gasoline powered light and emission pollution. People are different too, as well as landscapes now. More nuclear concentrations of people, that like us now, take a week to travel to see kin that were previously a days ride away. My heart floats with the dream of getting into a shiny car, and with single-handed ease completing this journey we are on today to the foothills of Chicago in a few hours of comfort. I am aware of my aching ass and sore joints from the plodding progress of days of horseback riding, and the longing of ‘Are we there yet?’
The Big Onion, land of the Illini.
I cannot imagine the time when it was flat. I have always seen it as rolling hillside. The great thirst drove the Midwest from their automobiles and onto their feet. In a single generation those corn fed heifers shed so much collective lard that the landscape underwent isostatic recoil – a once archaic phrase associated with glaciation that has rebounded into common usage as a result of this now national and recent phenomenon. Other common phrases at the time such as ‘Gas her up’ and ‘Burn rubber’ are fading now, only comically apparent in ancient movies and songs.
We now live longer, and also live lighter. We have longer to go to get where we are going.
The geopolitical landscape is different too. Previously vitally important places are now simply deserts again. They no longer have the power to make us covet and kill, since cars do not run on sand. Petrochemical conglomerates no longer rule the government and kill the land. American deserts are once again green. Places like Detroit and Michigan that were wastelands that flourished, thrived and died at the whim of the American automobile industry are now desirable communities of horse breeders and makers of carriages and saddles.
Grandpa’s voice has faded now into a background hum, like rain on canvass. In my mind it is joined with the voices of historians, documentarians and politicians – each having impressed upon me through a tautological dialog the cause and effect of cars and gas.
This bittersweet reverie I vaguely interpret as part of my passage into manhood, that the advancement of society is a balance upon a double edged sword, and as much as we strive to tip this balance toward us, there are irresistible natural forces that will eventually right it, but that mankind see as setbacks as they are reversals of our myopic will.
I am young, and I am tired. I no longer hear my Grandpas voice, but these complex issues compete in my weary brain for primacy and deny the sleep my body craves. Slowly, one by one these tendrils unravel, relinquishing me to the arms of Morpheus and the delicious dream.
I am older now. Old enough to drive, but living two centuries prior.
On broad paved highways I drive at will, passing establishments that fuel my car, feed me, and afford me rest at the end of a days long journey. My ultimate destination is uncertain, but approaching with the thrill and promise of each new day. I am becoming a man, and today I am driving to see my girl. My long legs, made strong by years of walking press levers on the floor that pass through a bulkhead to a legendary hemi. Grandpas glittering black eyes look out through my adolescent face and guide my hands to navigate these ancient routes. My nose is full of the heady stuff of leather upholstery and partially combusted high test, my loins and heart swell with the massage of the engine and the promise of my destination and my ears are ringing to the ancestral rhythms of my Georgian forefathers.
“I got a little change in my pocket going jingle lingle ling
Want to call you on the telephone, baby, I give you a ring”
