Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Route 301
A Report From The Dark Side Of Mars
Three a.m. in August of 1962, on US 301, still two-lane, through rural
Virginia. The night was humid with vapor from the nearby Potomac River.
Bugs shrieked and keened in the woods, like bearings that needed lubrication.
Gus’s Esso glowed in the night, brash and red as a Budweiser sign. Route
301 was still the freight route to Florida. Interstate 95 had not yet
gone through Fredericksburg, stealing the long-haul north-south traffic
and killing businesses on the highway.
After midnight, traffic was mostly big trucks. They roared past the
dark forest, roadside trash blowing in the blast, tires whining as mournful
as lost dogs. Miles away, they coughed, downshifted, gathered themselves
to blatt their way up the grade to Edge Hill. Hour after hour they sailed
by.
The country boys worked shifts in the county’s gas stations, six days
a week at seventy-five cents an hour. For the most part we were wiry,
slightly crazy, with bad complexions and the empty minds of thirteenth-century
peasants. At night we worked alone. Crime had not yet engulfed America.
For a stripling of sixteen it was a big feeling. The big roads at night
were not a kid’s world. We liked that
I’d sit in the office, door open, and listen to the radio or just
to the silence. Outside, above the fluorescent lights of the pump islands,
insects swirled and jittered. The forest brooded dark around. Once a
green luna moth landed on the outside of the plate glass. It was about
the size of Batman. I walked over and peered into bulging dark eyes
inches away. A bug like that can make you think the world is stranger
than they tell us, with maybe more to it.
It was another time and a smaller world. The Sixties hadn’t started.
We kids lived in rural isolation, knowing nothing of the growing tumult
in the Middle East, of which we had never heard, or of the coming war
in Asia, where some of us would die, or anything beyond the bounds of
King George County. Drugs didn’t exist. There were as many malls in
the county as there were Bactrian camels. We knew only what we saw,
what we did—the woods, creeks, fishing, crabbing on the river, guns,
sock hops, innocent attempts at lechery and, especially, cars.
In a dispersed land, with people living in remote farms and tiny towns,
some of them not even wide spots on the roads, cars were important.
We lived and dreamed them, craved the forged pistons we couldn’t afford,
the milled heads and magneto ignition. A boy automatically cataloged
cars that streamed by on the highway: fitty-six Fly-mouth, ’48 Chev,
ba-a-ad-ass 61 ‘Vette, exotic confections like a Studebaker Avanti.
It was funny how a kid could bond to his car almost as he might to
a favorite pooch. Your mosheen was part of who you were. Butch wasn’t
Butch. He was, for all time in memory, Butch of the ’53 Ford painted
white with barn paint. When you parked in some deserted lane in the
darkness of Saturday night, you had a fond appreciation for what your
crumbling rust bucket could do, such as, usually, start.
A gas station was a natural home for us.
You learned funny things: where the gas cap was on every car ever
made. (Try a fitty-six Chevy.) Mostly it was just “Fillerup? Check y’awl?”
squeegee the windshield, maybe trans fluid, tires. Self-service stations
were in the future. People were courteous.
In the late hours a seriousness fell over the highway. At four a.m.
we got travelers who meant it, running on caffeine and maybe no choice,
faces blank with a dozen hours on the road. They’d slow from a steady
eighty—past midnight the cops were sparse and didn’t care anyway—get
fuel, hit the rest rooms, and blow on out in five minutes. At the pumps
the mufflers ticked and creaked as they cooled and there was sometimes
a momentary camaraderie between people out in the lonely night when
nobody with sense was. I’ve felt the same thing on the bridge of a carrier
on a late watch.
Strange things happened. Others were said to have happened. A tall
skinny senior we called Gopher worked shift at Gus’s. Gopher was a bright
but odd country kid with a perpetually puzzled expression. You had a
feeling he wasn’t always sure where he was. Being immensely tall and
wearing a Norfolk and Western cap, he looked like a lighthouse disguised
as a railroad engineer.
One day (I was told, and hope it is true) a woman pulled up to the
island in a Corvair—a car, now extinct, that was shaped like a bar of
soap and low to the ground. The car was as short as Gopher was tall.
From altitude Gopher asked, “Can I help you, Ma’am?
“Do you have a rest room?”
The distance was too great. Gopher thought she had said, “Whisk broom,”
and responded, “No, Ma’am, but we could blow it out for you with the
air hose.” In the resulting turmoil, Gopher had no idea why she was
yelling at him.
The roads were a course in humanity. We picked up a jack-leg sociology
that, later, years of thumbing the continent would verify. The better
the car, the worse the people in it. Owners of Cadillacs were awful
snots, but people in old pickups would go out of their way for you.
That sounds too cute, but it’s true. Cadillacs didn’t impress us anyway.
There was just something wrong with those people. Now if they’d had
a huge Chrysler hemi with pistons like buckets and cross-bolted bearing
journals….
One night a smoking, rattling wreck of a former school bus pulled
in. Migrant workers. Fabric showed on the tires. They were going north
to harvest some crop or other. They were not Latinos, as we had not
yet opened the southern border. I could tell they were down on their
luck. They were ragged, wore bandannas and crumbling jeans, and just
looked tired. Two dollars gas. The driver politely asked if they could
use the rest room as if he thought I might say no.
I gave them a couple of quarts of used oil. More correctly, reprocessed
oil. Kids didn’t steal from their employers as they do now, and it was
the only time I did it, but, well, those folk needed oil, and they didn’t
have money. It was thirty-five cents a can.
A different place.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
