Sometimes rural America looks like crap

 

Sometimes rural America looks like crap

especially in sleet when you’re driving
a vintage VW bus with a weak heater
north from Chesapeake Bay.
It’s all gray. The railroad tracks.
The town with three bars and no cafe.

With my six-year-old son riding shotgun,
shivering, toweling the windshield,
I’m looking for some dead ancestor’s homestead
but we’d settle for a warm drink and a cheeseburger.
At a gas station we get heat-lamped hot dogs,
a basket of backyard apples (tart and crunchy),
their last pair of gloves (I wear left, my son right)
and directions.

Here, this dirt road. Cows plod in front of us
sloshing their udders until a wet dog chases them away.
There, a barn missing half its wood. Rock foundation.

We poke around. A red pickup stops.
A farm boy asks what we’re doing. He says
somebody’s been stealing the weathered siding.
“Not me,” I tell him, and we make to leave.
He tells me the land we’re looking for is under water
since they built the Conowingo Dam
and we’re in Pennsylvania now, anyway.
There’s no sign when you cross the line.

We pass a dead horse, vultures. Farmhouses
surrounded by trash and cars. A hawk glaring
from a bare tree. To get home it’ll be two hours
by freeway at the mercy of tractor-trailers
through the tunnel under Baltimore Harbor.
“Sorry,” I say to my son.
“This is great,” he says.

From me he got the explorer gene.
Icy road, we take it easy.
Somehow, a fine day.

……

From my book Random Saints
First published in San Pedro River Review. Thank you Jeffrey & Tobi Alfier, editors
photo by StockSnap