My gas light lit up orange ten miles ago and a cruel red X has devoured the service bars on my cell phone screen. The clock on my dashboard dimly flashes 11 p.m. I am in Eclectic, Alabama, where I have never been before, and I don’t know how to get where I am going.
I stopped on the old, broken, holey, paved road where a hill let me have a bar of service to make a desperate call for rescue to Ben. I don’t remember how I met Ben: probably through friends or at a bar in Auburn. He is a dear friend of happy fate and I am going back to his home town, back to his place of growing, to see what makes this Ben I know.
“Stop when you get to the fork in the road,” he instructed me, “I’ll meet you there.” Two minutes later we were in the driveway of his family home. I took a deep beautiful breath, stepped out of my truck, and remembered why I had made the trip out there.
The bitter November night grabbed my hand, numbed my fingers and made me question if it was worth sacrificing the warmth of my coat pocket to hold on to my newly opened can of cold cheap beer. With my other arm wrapped tightly around Ben, I sat on the back of the four-wheeler as we sped down the road. Six of us rode on four ATVs up and down and over the dirt roads of Ben’s home town. Despite the cold, I couldn’t help but smile at the Midnight adventure, a re-creation of how Ben spent his days before Auburn. I was in his world. I was getting a trip back to see how he came to be the man I know now and I soaked in every simple moment of the precious experience.
As the ATVs roared down the road, Ben turned his head; eyes still ahead, voice aimed for me and told me, as we passed a ditch, of the time his friends wrecked a couple of four-wheelers; and when we passed the creek, he let me in on the time he spent an Independence Day floating down it with friends. His free hand danced in the air in front of him as he told me about the time he sunk his new four-wheeler in the swamp three years before. Every story was another piece of Ben, another glimpse into the things he treasures most in life, the way he reacts to events of life and what he takes away from his experiences.
We journeyed off the dirt road and made the ATVs climb a hill. The isolated path we took wouldn’t have been found by anyone that didn’t know it was there. If it hadn’t been done hundreds of times before, I would have thought it impossible to navigate the four-wheeler to the top. Ben and his friends called this hilltop we were traveling to, ‘the lookout spot’ and I wondered what I should expect as I hid behind Ben’s back to avoid being smacked by tree branches on the way up.
Reaching the top of the hill was like falling into a world away from reality. When the sound of the ATV motors shut off, silence consumed the noise of the world and became the loudest part of the night. The flat hilltop was no bigger than my apartment, but up there I felt bigger than any issue I’d been dealing with. No tree grew tall enough to block our view, and no star was dull enough to be forgotten.
Since building a fire was the next brilliant idea we had, Don walked off into the darkness to find sticks and wood to burn. Hannah laughed at Don and told us that the correct term for Brad’s title was her fee-ons not fee-on-say, while Brad quietly started stacking Don’s stick collection in a campfire ready stance. And when Hannah made another joke about Josh being a red-head, he stammered about nothing and walked off with a smile to make sure Don hadn’t fallen off the edge of their hill.
“Who owns this property?” I asked, wondering who would be upset in the morning to find their bale of hay gone and a black spot of soot in the middle of flattened circular hilltop. “We don’t know,” replied Ben, “we think its Alabama Power or something. A lot of the property around here is owned by them or hunting clubs.”
My chest felt full of life; ready to burst. They all told stories of their high school mischief. Revealing more of themselves, remembering more of each other. “I have to be honest, Josh; we did set your trashcans on fire that one time,” Ben confessed. “It was fun, but sorry about that.”
Cold and dew-y at four a.m. we put out the fire and rode back to the house. Alone with Ben in the kitchen, he shared. Pieces of him standing out stronger than the rest, “I was adopted, did you know that?” turned into, “this was where everyone hung out in high school,” to “I know another season of my life is close, I just don’t know what it is.” And finally, “I have nothing without God, he’s my everything. “
“How do you get to your roof?” I asked once the conversation came to and end. A couple months earlier, Ben turned 24 and he told me that on that night, he sat on his parent’s roof, smoked a cigarette, and wanted to jump. We stepped on the couch and climbed through the window onto the second story roof. The roof was steep but the thrill of the unsafe climb made the view from the top settle well in my bones. Were we up higher than the rest of Alabama; how much of his life did he spend above the treetops, more acquainted with the stars than I, in this overwhelming, reoccurring silence? “The silence can be loud sometimes,” Ben said. “During the day you can see water towers from towns all around. You can see for counties from up here.” On our way back down, I heard a thump behind me and grabbed Ben’s belt loop as he slid down the roof, on his way to the ground, far below. He came to rest beside me and took a deep breath, “that’s never happened to me before; I can always keep my footing.”
As the sun was coming up, I fell asleep in a recliner, surrounded by my new sleeping friends, content and full from the night’s journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment