Roads, belts of asphalt or concrete, arrow straight or curly as a grapevine, they slip and wriggle through mountains, vectoring the view, and slash true as a blade on the flats, the shortest distance between two points, city to country to town and back.

We drove from San Diego to Bethesda in 1954 with my new brother and then back to Las Vegas in time for me to start kindergarten in 1955, my parents’ marriage choking on the exhaust fumes somewhere around Oklahoma City.  By the time I was seven and we lived, minus dad, in the first house that wasn’t on a military base, I’d seen thirty of our united states from the window of a car.  A picture of us was taken in the driveway, lined up in front of a ’56 Mercury, Easter egg yellow, a Z of chrome jigging down the side.  Every summer included a drive to Kansas City with stops at Denver and the odd national park.  When I fly across the country, I look down from 35,000 feet at the quilt of middle America farmland and remember how it looked at 50 miles an hour, horizontal.  It’s where I’d rather be, on the ground, where the view is real instead of imagined, and where I would be if life weren’t so much about timelines and deadlines, calendars and clocks.

            447 miles on the road, and I was home by early afternoon a few days ago, seven hours after I left Monterey in the dark morning of that October Thursday, not anywhere near a record time, but I stopped for Red Bulls and to pee three times, topping off the Mini twice to contribute a few dollars to the gas stations that I know have clean toilet seats.  I think of it as good bathroom karma.

            Margery’s house will be sold soon, fingers crossed, and there will be one less reason to take the 101 route instead of the far faster Interstate 5 north to San Francisco without a reason to stop in Carmel.  An afternoon spent sneezing in the moldy dust of the storeroom downstairs that didn’t burn when the house did in ’99 yielded three cardboard boxes, my dad’s metal General Issue suitcase and a W magazine with old photos pressed carefully between the pages.  There were some surprises, pictures of children who grew up and later wrote letters, also saved, that told of places they had traveled, loves they had held.  A beautiful picture of my father that I’d never seen, in his dress uniform.  I can picture his eyes softening as he looked at the school snaps I hold in my hand -- his eager-faced youngest son, my hair in braids he tried to weave but couldn't master, his sharp eyebrows pasted on our foreheads.  A picture of a beautiful young Margery and her boy, looking Photoshopped and disconnected, I think, but perhaps only because I know his tragic last chapter.  A picture of her favorite car, stuck among the birthday cards.

            It’s rained early this year and for several days, soaking California from the central coast to Mexico, blackening the tree bark and cooling the air in the foothills’ folds.  Winter’s green grass is showing under the lionesses’ buff shoulders and haunches around Paso Robles, oaks spilling down the east slopes, their limbs twisted like iron wrought by the Spanish smiths.  Further south of Templeton the hills close in on the highway and the asphalt lane swoops and slows at their feet, the sky’s grey darkens and my little car’s lights lead me around the next curve and further down the road.