Made the long drive back from upper Michigan last night. 450 miles or so, about 9 hours. With that kind of a trek in the works, I dragged out the departure, spending close to an hour sitting on a bridge over the Little Carp River, waiting for a kingfisher, and taking an extra 2 mile loop on my way back to the car. Yes, the old white Navajo is still running, although one of the wheels is unbalanced and I had to keep around 65 for most of the trip back.

It’s tough, in a way, to watch the wilderness slowly replaced by civilization in its various forms, of which I got a neatly progressive cross-section travelling from an upper tributary of the highway system, Michigan route 107, to the great river of I-90 and the oceanic chaos of the Chicago freeway system. The little towns with a two-lane highway, a church, an Elks club or a Vietnam Vets club (always with a Huey posted outside at some improbable angle); then the larger speed-traps, where the highway stays at 4 lanes and winds through a seemingly endless strip of hastily built and poorly weathering structures ranging from abandoned heaps of shingles to shiny new aluminum prefab warehouses and blocky concrete office parks, all looking like the last poor sap at the bar, hoping it’ll last, whatever it is. At some point highway 51 becomes an interstate hopeful. Whole mountains (such as Wisconsin has) are bisected to run a pair of regulation grade concrete ribbons up into the pines, lakes, bogs, and mosquitos. The interstate either destroys a town or turns it into a suburb of the nearest city, even if that’s only Madison and it’s a hundred miles away. As horrible as that sounds, it doesn’t take much mental effort to drive a hundred miles on a country interstate. There’s nothing to look at, and all the towns have the same three fast food joints listed on the little blue signs at each exit.

I listened to Sarah Vaughan up in the woods, then some mix CDs, then the Cure, around about the time I hit Wasau. There’s really something to that music, lyrics of suburban disaffection and teenage hopefulness on top of a sound no one had been able to make before then, dark and impressionist. Debussy, if he had grown up in an age of strip malls, played a guitar, and couldn’t speak French. Then I flipped through the radio stations, a drive-by sampling of country, Christian country, Christian rock, Christian talk, classic rock, 80’s hits and soft rock classics (always hard to tell at first listen where a station lies on the spectrum between the last two, or if it even acknowledges the difference). Something holy about driving through the rain with your hand on the dial, as if you were one of Wim Wender’s angels, straining through the static for the hopes and dreams of all these strangers. But what’s Nick Cave to an angel? Only what he sees in the eyes of others. The rest of us have memories that stir: the woods, with their mixture of Maine and the Cascades; the drive I once took to a Boston with a woman I loved (even then, when my hands were barely open), listening to her flip through the stations; camping in the redwoods. Various other scars. I perceive the world only through that lens, through what has marked me. And this is a very good thing. Angels may well envy us it, and some say even God longed to have that terrible sweet gift. In the end you have to say, like poor Jeff Buckley, Hallelujah. The alternative ain’t pretty.

(cdm | UpperPeninsulaReturn)