Tag: Solitude

Categories
Dayton Ohio Memories

The Mirror and the Boxcar

When the plane started circling, I needed to disappear.

I was just goofing around on my own with an army surplus signaling mirror in our treeless backyard in Kettering. A thick piece of bright rectangular glass with an opening in the middle where light could shine through a cross. To signal you had to line up the light shining through with the opening.

Living close to Wright-Patterson, C-119 Flying Boxcars were a common sight. I could hear one coming before I could see it. I turned and scanned the sky. There it was.

Maybe this was worth a try. What did it even mean?

I held it up, aimed and hoped.

Then I saw it. The plane started a turn to the left. Uh oh.

I didn’t want to be reported. I ran into the woods behind our house. I watched and waited.

The circle completed. The boxcar flew on.

I walked back into the house and put the mirror back on the chest of drawers in my bedroom.

I never told anyone. Not even you.

Categories
Books Living Quotations

The Smallness of Being Nowhere

There’s a sentence I keep returning to from Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon’s account of driving the back roads of America after his marriage ended and his teaching job disappeared in the same week:

“In a hotel room at the geographical center of North America, a neon sign blinking red through the cold curtains, I lay quietly like a small idea in a vacant mind.”

I’ve read it probably a dozen times now and it still does something to me. The question I can’t shake: why does it work so completely?

The setup is all precision and specificity. “The geographical center of North America” — Heat-Moon is actually in Rugby, North Dakota, a place so particular it exists mostly as a fact. You cannot be more specifically somewhere on a continent and also be more nowhere. That’s the first compression: location as the opposite of orientation.

Then the neon sign. Red through cold curtains. He doesn’t describe the room — the bed, the low ceiling, the highway sound. He gives you the one sensory detail that pulses, that intrudes. Red blinking through fabric. That’s loneliness rendered as light. You don’t need the rest of the room. You already know it.

And then the simile arrives, and it’s the sentence’s whole reason for existing.

Like a small idea in a vacant mind.

What’s strange is that it shouldn’t work. It’s abstract — ideas, minds — in a sentence that’s been building toward the physical and concrete. But Heat-Moon has earned the turn. He’s given us geography, then sensation, and now he cashes both in for something interior. The simile tells you exactly how the previous details felt from the inside: not tragic, not dramatic, not even particularly sad. Just small. A flicker of thought in an empty space.

The word “quietly” is doing more than it announces. He doesn’t lie there awake or restless or afraid, all the words that would have been available and true and insufficient. He lies quietly, which is a posture, not an emotion. It places him in the scene without claiming too much about what the scene means.

This is what I find myself most drawn to: the sentence doesn’t reach for profundity. It doesn’t tell you this moment is significant, doesn’t linger on the loss that brought him there. It just describes, precisely, what it’s like to be a self that has temporarily lost its weight — to exist at the center of something vast while feeling like an afterthought in your own head.

There’s another line from the same book that works entirely differently, and I keep it nearby as a kind of corrective:

“Life doesn’t happen along interstates. It’s against the law.”

The first sentence is a philosophy. The second sentence is a joke about highway regulations that somehow confirms the philosophy. The gap between those two moves — the microsecond where you process that he means both things — is where the humor lives.

What’s funny is also true: the interstate is literally designed to prevent you from stopping, from turning off, from being anywhere specific. You are processed through the landscape like freight. Heat-Moon understood that the road you take isn’t a neutral choice. The blue highways of the title — the old two-lane routes, drawn in blue on gas station maps — were the ones where you might actually arrive somewhere, talk to someone, become something other than your destination.

The joke earns its keep because it doesn’t explain itself. He trusts you to feel the absurdity and then sit with the fact that absurdity is sometimes just accuracy.

What strikes me, holding both sentences together, is how much range lives in a single book. The hotel room passage asks you to feel the weight of smallness. The interstate line asks you to laugh at the systems we build to keep life at a safe distance. Both are true. Both are, in their different registers, about the same thing: what you miss when you move through the world without stopping.

That’s what the geographical center does. At the exact middle of a continent, you are as far from every edge as you can be. You are equidistant from significance. The neon blinks anyway. And you are there, small, in the dark — on a blue highway, not an interstate. Which means, at least according to Heat-Moon, that something might still happen.

I don’t know why I find this more moving than sentences that try harder. Maybe because precision, applied to the right details, is its own kind of tenderness.

Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been that small idea in a vacant mind, and it’s a relief to find it named.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Writing

Notes for a Distant Shore

I spend an embarrassing amount of time trying to control how people hear me. Most of us do. We want to be understood, neatly categorized, and told we make sense. But sitting down to actually write and sharing publicly requires dropping all of that. You just have to surrender.

Richard Rhodes nailed the feeling:

“To write is always to seal notes into bottles and cast them adrift at sea; you never know where your notes will drift and who will read them.”

You’re basically bottling up whatever is rattling around in your head on a Tuesday afternoon, tossing it into the digital ocean, and walking away. It’s vulnerable. Honestly, it’s a little reckless.

Once the bottle leaves your hand, you lose your voice. You can’t tap the reader on the shoulder to explain what a sentence really meant. The person who finds it brings their own weather to the shore. They might read a lifeline into a paragraph you barely thought about, or miss your main point entirely because they were distracted by the tide.

Forget about engagement metrics. The connections that actually matter rarely show up on a dashboard anyway. You write something, and it drifts. Maybe for years. Then someone stumbles over it exactly when they need it. You aren’t writing for a demographic; you’re writing for some random person walking the beach. True serendipity.

In the end, you just have to trust the water. Even if the bottle sinks, the act of throwing it is usually satisfying enough.

“Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life)

Categories
Living Massachusetts Nature

The Quiet Neighbor

There is a specific kind of silence that exists only in the shadow of fame. In Lincoln, Massachusetts, just a stone’s throw from where we used to live, lies Farrar Pond. It stretches out, bordered by trails and trees that turn to flame in the autumn, holding its water with a calm dignity.

It is beautiful, certainly. But it is not the pond.

Just over the hill sits Walden. That is where the pilgrims go. They go to see the replica of the cabin; they go to find Henry David Thoreau’s ghost; they go to stand in the spot where American transcendentalism found its footing. Walden is a celebrity. It carries the weight of history, of literature, and of the thousands of footsteps seeking an epiphany.

But we walked to Farrar.

There is a distinct grace in the “next pond over.” Farrar Pond doesn’t have a manifesto written about it. No one quotes its water levels in philosophy classes. Because it lacks the burden of expectation, it offers something Walden often struggles to provide amidst the tourists: actual solitude.

Living close by, you realize that nature does not distribute beauty based on historical significance. The herons stalking the shallows of Farrar do not care that they are fishing in the “lesser” water. The maples reflect just as clearly on its surface as they do on its famous neighbor’s.

“Nature does not distribute beauty based on historical significance.”

We often spend our lives chasing the Waldens—the recognized achievements, the famous locations, the validated experiences. We want to be where the plaque is. But life is mostly lived in the Farrar Ponds of the world: the quiet, unmarked places just down the road. The places that belong to us, not because they are famous, but because we were there to witness them.

Walden belongs to the world. Farrar belonged to the quiet afternoons. And sometimes, the anonymity of a place is exactly what makes it sacred.