On secluded roads, I drift longingly. Infused with bittersweet lonesome, the kind the old bluegrass masters sang of, it’s tiny majesty that finds me. Alone, mostly. Up mountain lanes and then back down through grassy hills I roll. Floating over narrow stretches of sun speckled blacktop barely wide enough for a buggy and a car to pass each other/ I wander aimlessly for all the same reasons anyone does. I do it to lose myself. I do it so I might think and feel. If I can imagine and forget/ with the ripped up winter road all pocked beneath my wheels/ then I’m good. It’s where I seem to belong to myself the most. Which sometimes makes me think that must mean this is where I belong the most too.
Here where I live, there are endless scattered pockets of walled-in sweeping worlds/ chunks of spring prairie laid out between deep dark woods. Burning August corn fields stand forever under the beating sun until they ultimately cross paths with some random forest shade. Trees grow here on the toes of beat-up ridges that once stood so much higher than they stand today. So long has it been now since they were majestic, these Appalachians sometimes probably hate themselves/ feel so sad and pointless. But what has crumbled beneath them draws me in. Left to die in private, humbled-out hills do just that. However, if you throw even a single passing through hiker or a dad and his daughter stalking squirrels with a .410 or some lonely suicide dreamer or maybe a couple of zitty long-haired teens wandering around smoking a one-hitter listening for gobblers, then you begin to shift everything. Unknowingly, of course, but mercifully all the same, it can be anyone who passes through that resuscitates the mountain.
You don’t have to be from here or know these trails like the back of your hand or any of that hog shit. You only have to feel the land wrapping you in its gentle arms. You know, you can be saved by other people. It happens all the time. But do you understand that you can also be saved by a grouse watching you from a cluster of mountain ash, a pure untamed bird with a gut full of berries? Maybe a decider you never saw. It’s up to him, some might say, if you live or die. It’s up to the blue sky treetops and the minuscule savage trout and the wind slapping the branches into the bark of a neighbor and it sounds like the frightened dead clawing frantically inside their buried coffins.
Coyotes might eat your cat some middle of the night, it’s true. But they might also have the final say on everything happening to us every single day. No, of course I can’t prove it; it’s only a wild feather I’m pondering. But I can’t disprove it either.
I need to climb up in them again one of these days. It’s been way too long. I drive around and look up at the whole fucking painting of my world, but it isn’t the same thing. A man hikes up the side of one of these mountains, he isn’t scaling some braggable peak. But who cares, I say. A few hundred yards in from where I might park the car, my heart will be slamming in my chest and my chest will be slamming through my coat and I will feel endangered by my own body.
What the hell?! I’ll hiss.
Then heaving forward, my hands down on my knees, my ex-smoker lungs filling up with wet cement and oatmeal and melted lead and chopped up raw onions, I’ll be crushed by the landslide of shame. It tastes like old cars/ like I’m sucking on a Plymouth Volare.
Why did I let myself go? I’ll gasp.
There’s this dark warm country surrealism that comes over me when I slow down to a crawl/ no cars in my rearview for a mile back/ the late afternoon shadows slathering up the side of a rickety farmhouse.
There’s a set of defeated goats standing in a pen of mud beneath the kitchen window. Their thick fur is matted with splotches of filth.
Hunting clothes flap on the line: captives hung by their feet.
Oversized blue plastic barrels that will outlive the planet stand back by a shed. What’s in them, I wonder to myself. It could be bird seed or dog food. It could be an old black bear cub in pickle juice, dead so many years now. If you put your hand down in there the brine would own you. When you tried to finger that scratchy pale black fur the whole creature would break apart like dandelion seeds.
My Honda slowing down is suspicious as hell, but what can I do? I need my fix no matter what the people who live here might think or say. The hell with them anyway. Everyone screws up their own masterpieces more often than not. I’m here to see the art before they fuck it all up. I’ve come all this way to watch feral kittens wheezing in the wreckage of a collapsed trailer home.
I have trundled down these endless roads just to behold tangles of scrap iron rusting in the cold country rain.
I crawl a few feet more and I see a cast off oil tank laying there- like a dead horse- back by the wood line. Once it warmed people/ now it serves no man. I wonder what life it sees now. I wonder if rat snakes rest in its shade when the summer days are too much. I bet the people that live here would just as soon plunk a .22 bullet into a snake’s eye than have it come around their home though. Then again, I could be wrong. Most people around here would likely just ignore a rat snake if they even spotted it at all. If it was a rattler, they’d chop its serpent head off with a rusted shit shovel. But a rat snake or a black snake/ no one cares.
I see the black mailbox with a name painted roughly across the side in faded white. The lettering is wonky, amateur, and uneven. T.W. MUSSER. I don’t know anyone by that name. But I admire their little world here.
Just before I touch my gas to slip away, I notice a stand of thin pines in grove formation over by a cow pond. The pines are young, not towering, and deathly still on this frigid afternoon. I see scattered blotches of snow caught in the crotches of their boughs. Each one fools me over and over again. I keep seeing a bald eagle’s head, but it never is.
The tranquil pine woods, their tang in the rain, fat drops blopping down through a thousand arms. When a piece of rain lands on your face in the woods, it might mean you’re transformed forever. Like some river bound for the sea. Lost oceans rolling down your eyebrow. You dipshit.
These feelings that accompany me as I move through theses spaces: I don’t quite know what to make of them. Maybe feelings is the wrong word? Maybe its not the word I’m after? These are not standard feels/ they live in the gray. Sad and happy mean nothing here. I find myself absolutely filled with light at times when I drive by some barn or outbuilding and notice a rusted Coke can growing paler in a small side window. The can is the old style, from many, many years ago, with a prominent lip around the outermost rim. I haven’t touched it (I don’t know how), but I can tell it’s that hard heavy steel they used in the 1970s, not this featherlight aluminum we call a soda can today.
Why does that move me so? I spot the stupid can and I can tell it has been sitting there in that same exact spot for decades now. No hand has bothered to gather it. No weather has smashed through to topple it. Christmas, Easter, 4th of July/ year after year/ unchanged and unknown. It’s a stupid fucking can. But also: no it’s not. It is a remnant of the past. It is a storyteller. It’s Pete Seeger. It’s Robert Johnson. It’s Johnny Appleseed.
Johnny Applecan.
Johnny Cokecan.
Johnny Cokehead.
I don’t know the story but I feel it grabbing me by the face.
Maybe you’re needing more from me than this stream of consciousness horseshit. It won’t happen. The current of my thoughts are connected. And it is indeed a stream passing beneath me when I float around certain corners. When I look out on a horse and another horse beyond that and the spring grass is high and swaying and there are crows on the horizon. Eggs in cartons by the honor box beneath the fence along the road. Dead squirrel in view of the fence. Skid marks in the road, somebody hit a deer maybe? Some night driver saw a coyote cross right in front of them? I see Amish kids dressed in black and blue way down by where the house stands alone. There are new flowers in the beds: snowdrops/ pansies/ crocuses/ and flowering quince. The children are standing in a scattering of chickens. I see them shielding their eyes from the midday sun as they notice my car out on the road. They are probably squinting to see what I do. They are probably trying to imagine all the different ways this thing could go
Will he come down our lane?
Is he an egg person?
Will he move along and go?
Who is in that car?
Has he seen the squirrel laying still as a stone?
Has he heard that it will rain?
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
