Rain

Rain

Those last two days. I believe when I left you all I was speeding back down the highway. The night I left Becky’s, I stayed in Buffalo, Wyoming, which is apparently where the ‘hole in the wall’ gang had their hole in the wall, though there is a place called Wall, SD., that Lewis thinks in the place, so I have to weigh the evidence of tourist information with a SD loyalist.

The staff was sulky at Holiday Inn Express, O’Neill, NE,  and the workout room with the bad equipment in it was locked and I was also feeling post-partum depression on leaving the trip part of the road trip, and Becky’s place, and not doing the Inipi and instead heading out to the Irish Capital of Nebraska….

The next morning, I did leave early. It was a day of only driving. In my mind, I had wondered if pushing forward to Council Bluffs would have been a good idea, but it took a long time to get there, and in fact it would have been a detour, so I just headed through to the I80 and enjoyed the good weather.  The truck was handling well, though I was stopping frequently to pump up the driver’s side rear tire, and to pump up the gas. I was back in NPR territory, so I caught up on the speculation about Pakistan and the current tension there due to the recent air strike, listened to an interview with Judy Blum, the legal struggles of the Occupy Movement and increasingly dire reports about The Weather.

It was hard to imagine the bad weather at first, since I was enjoying such lovely vistas and rapid passage, however, by the end of the day I had entered into the Chicago bad weather zone.   I had planned to drive until 1opm, in order to make good time.  I had thought that if I could get just a little further, I could give myself an easy day. Lewis was flying from Hungary, so we enjoyed talking to each other more freely on Skype as he waited in the Budapest airport. I told him that I had booked a room on Hotwire for Toledo and thought I would get there about midnight, and I was soooo excited to see him the next day, on Tuesday night.

Somewhere in there, it started to rain. Really, really rain. Rain so that I couldn’t see when trucks drove by. Rain so that I fishtailed just a little when they went past, just enough to bring back memories of the black ice in Montana. Rain so that I started going slow. So slow, that all my plans, to see Kit, to see Kevin, where starting to look hard to fit in. Finally, I had to stop, being soo tired. I was not yet in Toledo, but I was out of juice. To make matters worse, my tummy, which had forgiven me much, was finally beginning to rebel against the caffeine candies, 5-hour shots, ginseng and good old coffee.  This all resulted in me, sitting in the driving rain, at a truck stop, finally just falling asleep.  I slept a good 4 hours and woke up at 0330.  I was still happy.  I felt incredibly good at 0330, like I could drive forever, but the reality was that as soon as I got going, the rain, dark, slidiness all got to me. I pulled over again at 0630, still in the dark, but having passed through 3 more hours of the brutal conditions. I slept again.

The day continued like this. I drove until it was  bad idea, stopped, started.  I took the I80, to avoid ‘the lake effect’ and because the GPS said it was shorter. The highways were wide and roamed through the mountains and into the Hudson Valley.  The truck fishtailed, the rain poured, the trucks zoomed past and time crawled. It grew dark.  The road went high up, with signs boasting about its elevation. It zoomed downwards, and my memories of Montana came back until I had low-grade PTSD about going downhill.  Only the thought of getting there and seeing Lewis kept me going. And it did get easier. Lewis landed in Hartford and went to the hotel and kept me company for the last little bit.  The rain poured and poured but NPR had a great interview with the guy who wrote the Phantom Tollbooth, with stories about how he met Jules Pfeiffer, the illustrator, and the story behind the book and Lewis got to the hotel and at a certain point when I was getting close he began reading me the menu from the hotel restaurant.  And I finally got there, at about 2130, stopped the truck at the Hartford Airport and got out to a tremendous hug.  We went and had seafood soup and a bison burger and compared stories of the past ten days.

In the morning, we got up and drove back to Brattleboro. I unloaded the truck, went to the storage locker, and contributed to Lewis’s happiness while he re-discovered his bits of life.  I thought about Rocky Crocker at that moment, who had tried so hard to get the things into Saskatchewan.  These things have had much effort devoted to them.

And, when I arrived, and possibly, I suspect, because I nearly fell of a mountain, he brought up again the idea of marriage. Lewis has asked me to marry him three times in the past years (I have three lovely rings, mostly from the Albuquerque airport, all with bits missing because the stones have fallen out).) We had it in mind as something to do one day maybe in the distant future. This night, he asked me to marry him specifically on December 11th. Apparently, he has been doing some planning. Apparently he has planned a party!

So, I said yes.

So Many Bungees