5. A photo that makes you sad. Mom & me, Mt. Hood, Oregon, August 9, 2008
Today’s photo assignment was a little more difficult than the rest. I looked through a bunch of pictures, and yeah, there are photos that make me sad, or remember sad times — pictures of old girlfriends; pictures of me eating ice cream cake alone on my 8th birthday; pictures of me about to make huge mistakes (e.g. moving to New Jersey.) This picture actually doesn’t make me particularly sad, but it does bring up a lot of thoughts and such. At the risk of becoming extremely maudlin: This is, more or less, one of the last times I saw my mother. Gregory was out in Oregon to drive a road rally with our stepfather, Frank, and I flew out to Washington then drove down with Mom to meet them all and hang out. We had a great time. I almost didn’t go, if it weren’t for an intense kick in the ass courtesy of my brother (thank you, G) and I learned a lesson about making an effort. Anyway. That’s really the part that makes me sad — these pictures are a testament to my own self-destructive disinterest. Know too much now? I apologize.
But, while we’re on the subject — I was looking through last year’s NaNoWriMo report card (an excel spreadsheet that does a lot of great calculations as you plugin your daily word totals) and was reading through the comments I’d written. It’s standard fare for the first couple weeks: “I can’t do this”, “I really can’t do this”, “Oh wait, I can do this.” Until November 19th, a day on which I wrote a mere 194 words. The only comment is “fuck the planet.” After that, no more comments. No more filling in optional fields. Remember when I said that bad things always happen in November? Watch this space….
Alright. So, yesterday I wrote about a drive from my apartment to work, and today, looking through pictures, I found a photo of the particular road I was writing about. I thought they’d make a good photo/excerpt combo. Oh, also, Chocolate Peanut Butter Bugles exist.
This is Scott's Corner/Broadway road in Cranbury, NJ.
Two miles further, the road made a slow curve to the east, past more fields and then into a heavily wooded area, the street cutting a path through trees that towered overhead. During the summer the thick foliage would completely block out the sun but the trees were just now starting to sprout their leaves and so the sun peeked through casting shadows across the road, causing a strobe effect that could be disorienting and distracting. I loved it, looked forward to it each day. It felt like driving through some otherworldly place, another adventure for me. Today, however, the thought of driving through what was undoubtedly a cicada-covered hell gave me pause. I slowed down, hesitated, then looked again at the dashboard clock. 11:03. I was screwed. Doomed to endure another lecture from Sharon. I hadn’t even called. I hit the accelerator, felt the engine take hold, the wheels dig into the road, the car lurch forward and I zipped in amongst the trees.
The world was immediately different. The eerie silence that I’d experienced outside of the forest was gone, replaced instantly by a high pitched droning noise that was strangely similar to a phaser from the original Star Trek series. The car shuddered as if buffeted by intense wind, it felt as if I had slowed, like I was driving through thick tar. The noise was unnerving and was so loud that it caused me to instinctively raise my hands to my ears to try to block it out. The car swerved sharply to the left and I realized what a bad idea this was to while driving 70 miles per hour in a car with shoddy wheel alignment. I dropped my right hand back to the wheel, jerked the car back to the road and drove on. With my left hand, I groped for the lever to raise the window. Even with the window closed, the sound from the trees was still nearly deafening.
I gritted my teeth, clenched the wheel with both hands, willing the car to stay on the road which wound its way through the trees. I risked glances to the left and right. The forest was alive, the trees were moving. They passed in a blur, once brown trunks now black, brown, spots of white, dotted with the fiery red of the bugs’ eyes. I drove through the living nightmare, now resisting the urge to look at anything except the road, but the road itself was coming to life. Here and there, the pavement was cracked and cicadas streamed upward and out, the crunch of dead insects under my wheels now faintly audible behind the constant hum, my car tires committing a mini-genocide that gave me some small amount of pleasure until I realized that for every cicada I drove over there were ten more live ones behind it and hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands more in the trees.
And then it was over. The stretch of road passing through the forest was only about a mile long, and though it had seemed while I was in it that time had slowed to a crawl, that I would never make it through, the laws of physics hadn’t been completely suspended. It had taken me less than a minute to make it. My car burst from the trees, into unfiltered sunlight and complete silence.