The huge thunderheads of these September days rise over the mountains far to the east, piling up on each other, filling the dry sky, sucking every drop from my skin. This awful heat holds me down, hides me inside these walls, wishing for the smallest breeze to stir the panting elm leaves outside my office window. Waiting for a crack, a break, a flood, a change. Please.

            Transitions are hard for me. I have always been impatient for something to just be whatever it is and not waste a lot of time be-coming. Someone recently said I am a no-nonsense person, and it made me smile. Silliness, yes, laughing until my sides hurt, yes, but no chewing at the edges. I always had so much to do, there wasn’t time for equivocation or pretense. You want something? Tell me. Don’t twirl on the stair and make me guess. This summer won’t become fall even though it has baked us all to husks; it is making me beg with mocking clouds and distant rumbles. I want to go find it and make it stop.

            Or maybe I just want to go. Not to actually find anything but just to answer that call from the road that beats behind my morning thoughts and in my dreams, to set out in the dark of the day and follow my headlights like a dog’s nose until the sky lightens to Easter pink and I put on my sunglasses to cover the tears.

            Driving is what I’ve always done. A car does what you tell it to, goes where you say and will get you there. An easy hand on the stick-shift, one foot on the clutch, one on the gas and the engine talks to your legs as they tighten and relax. A car will climb and slow, turn and gather itself, ess through hills on narrow tracks and fly down miles of arrow-straight asphalt direct to Wherever. Driving, I’m not just on the trip but in the trip.

            There will be red licorice, left with the cellophane off so it’s stale and stiff, hard to bite and harder to chew, and the snapcrack of Juicy Fruit or Dentyne, a noisy trick I learned from my seventh-grade pal Leslie Pitts while we spent hours picking the chenille tufts off her mother’s bedspread and talking about kissing boys (and that I now only do in the car). I will roll down the window and pretend it’s decades ago and I’m taking that first delicious drag off a Virginia Slims Menthol, squinting, the nicotine speeding through my bloody arteries. The straw from my drive-thru Coke will stand in for a cigarette; the desert air will smell like smoke.

            iPod iTunes iFavorites, songs from Joni and Janis, David and Stephen and Graham, Neil with them and without, Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, Beyonce, The Beatles and Bonnie and Bareilles, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther, James Taylor and Taylor Swift, Joe Cocker, Jennifer Nettles and All That Jazz. I will sing. Not as well as I used to but just as loud. With more heart than I had when I was young, since now I know those lyrics are not just someone else’s story.

            For a moment I’ll wish that you were beside me, that your hand would reach for mine and lift it off the steering wheel, hold it to your heart and say, “I understand, I do.” But only for a moment.

            These twists and straightaways are my lonely road, not one I share either because I should or I want to. The miles give me strength, the blowing dirt sands the uncertainty off my skin, fills my mind with a million details - the smells of pine needles and cowshit, the crops in fields that repeat their hopscotch grid to the horizon, hawks sadly screaming to each other - that weigh down the memories, push them to the bottom of the well. I need to do this alone, to relax my own shoulders and fill up my own spaces.

            Maybe when I’ve stopped for the Nth night and eaten another taco or chicken-fried steak or piece of pie, plugged in the shiny beeping metal things for an eight-hour juicing and lain down on another cowboy mattress, spring-sprung from one-nighters. When my eyes, dry as Tucson, see the figure-eight ghost of his girlfriend’s Taiwan denim shorts (her sequined heart winking on one cheek) on the linoleum where she dropped them off her ankles like weights that tied her to this life. When I’ve felt the faint breath of another excuse for an air-conditioner that couldn’t dry the yeasty sweat under my breasts if I pressed them against its plastic panes. Maybe then I’ll wonder if it’s today.

            When the heat stops and the road stops. When I drive around a bend and the air feels like I opened the refrigerator and the clouds blow apart and the rain falls in fat splats on my hood and Niagaras off the dirt, baring the brave blue paint. When I swerve onto the vista turnout and kill the engine and sit there in the din, rain coming so hard, in waves that beat and breathe and beat again, so hard that everything is rain - hurled from the sky, bouncing off the black road and my little pod of a car, the up meeting the down in a white mist that shivers and forms its own cloud, five feet tall and as wide as a mountain. When the raw air somehow finds its way into the car and cools my eyelids, then this infernal summer will be over.

            After a while, everything below will be swollen and the rivers from the sky will become breeze-blown drops, and the trees will shake their branches and tell their leaves to begin to die. I’ll get out and lean against the car, tilt my lips up for a wet kiss and shake my curls, let the last drops run into my ears and down the lines from my nose to the corners of my mouth. I will lick water off my face that doesn’t taste like salt. It will be time to turn around, to head back, go home. 

Highway songs:

Jackson Browne, The Road and the Sky

Lyle Lovett and Townes Van Zandt, If I Needed You 

Lyle Lovett, Farther Down the Line