The Vapors Are Having Their Way With Me
Greenfield Rest Area Eastbound, outside Indianapolis, off Routh 70 East. Visited on February 26, 2023
Praise the sun! Yes, it’s chilly but nothing compared to the two weeks we spent in North Dakota. It feels good to step into 40-degree weather. I don’t even wear a jacket as I approach the building. With each step, the smell of vinegar grows stronger. Closer now, I discover why: An attendant sprays cleaner on the glass doors. The concentration of his fluid favors the acidic. By the time I’ve finish peeing, the fumes have gathered strength. The whole building is noxious, sterilized. I planned to fill my bottle with water, but the attendant is wiping down the fountain. I would wait from him to finish, but the vapors are having their way with me. When I exit the building and look around, everything is wrong. I am disoriented. The sun is brighter than I remember. The car is gone. Where is my wife? Have I gone mad! If so, I am surprisingly calm. I am, in fact, mellow. What reason is there to panic? A rest area is a place where time works differently. I may as well be at the center of a black hole or the middle of a daydream. It comes to me after four or five seconds (that feel like a half hour) that I have exited the opposite entrance. I am in the other parking lot, on the other side of the building, the side for truckers and their semis and retirees and their RVs. The next four or five seconds (that feel like one minute), I experience what you might call a “settling,” by which I mean that transitory feeling of returning to “reality” after a “dream,” as your senses recover their ability to put everything rigidly back into place. For most, this is relief. For poets, it can be jarring. Rather than return the way I came, I walk around the building. I see the car. I see my wife. Words loosely resembling a poem flash through my mind:
The cessation of a beating heart:
What does it mean?
Are you dead or just very, very cold?