SR
I had to keep sharp or else I’d get stuck, alone and away from help. When I left, I knew this would be a trip not like any I’d been on. I had to adjust my thinking to drop the notion that it was even that. If I didn’t make it, I’d be uselessly on the road.
Twenty hours later and wary, I crossed state lines from one Dakota to the other. With every mile behind me, the more my anxiety manifested itself. I pulled over every dozen miles to review my scribbled down plan—the people I’d contact, the roads that would take me where I needed to be. I rehearsed the words I’d say if I was pulled over. I told myself over and again, “this is right.”
I drove into the fog and turned up the radio. Snow was heavy on the vast expanse of the Dakota Plains and I was in the middle of it. In all directions, white and deadened landscape reached far to the horizon where sky indistinguishably met the land. Dark cello, fuzzy distorted guitar tones and crashing percussion reverberated out into the wind and through the fog from the open windows of my car. There were no trees and very little visible life. Headlights really got me. I expected aloneness, so when they’d show up in the mirror, my heart would beat harder until they’d disappear.
Once it set in where I was, I felt many ways at once. It was 30 miles away and I felt eager anticipation, nervousness, hyperawareness of self and place. Also, fear. I was scared because I knew about what was happening.
There is always a plane flying overhead.
Joseph Lawrence Olbrych 