Something in the trees had reminded me that I always felt like I was silently screaming back then in a way ordinary people couldn't hear. Those screams seem to have not stayed with me, but with that place. When I go back there I hear them through my attachment to it even though I have become one of those ordinary people.

When I remember being that person and being in that situation, my life is easy to appreciate. It is the gift of then. The effect of standing there so many years later was to look at myself and realize.... I did it. I had survived, escaped and defined myself. I have achieved something mundane and ordinary, but extraordinary to the kid back then.

I grew up next to a liquor store that sold bait for fishing at the Lake of Egypt. The store even had a couple large tanks out in the back of it where it kept some of the fish along with snapping turtles the owner liked to eat. I used to sit as a kid and look into the dark water and see a school of glowing eyes swarming and looking up at me. It was common to find dead fish along drainage ditches and water holes that fishermen had discarded on their way home from the lake.

The tracks were a source of constant adventure when I was a kid. Fueled by the inspiration of movies like The Goonies I crawled down or in every hole in the ground and through every tunnel. I never found Sloth or any pirate's treasure, but I certainly had adventures all my own and found turtle shells and pretty enough rocks.

p.s.

Telephone poles trailing off into the distance on Chamness trail (in Illinois) this summer.

For some reason I keep thinking about On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Mostly of his character of Dean, the "holy con-man". I first read the book in high school. Dean was the id character of the pre-Homer era. Pickup on a few lines here and there. Found myself wandering into town a few nights later in the middle of the night. I lived miles out in the country. For the majority of the trip, I walked the yellow dividing lines. I wouldn't say I got a lot from the book back then, but one line stuck in my head that night.

"I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out."

I stood in the road for a minute looking in either direction. It was probably around 3 am. The night was blue and dark. I saw fog rising quietly off a pond in the distance. I walked to the side of the road and tried to imagine what "Sal" might have seen. For a split second I let myself see the blistering day that was still hours away. I knew it would be hot, since at 3 am it still felt muggy and warm. The image of Dean stuck in my mind the majority of the walk. I got to the town just at daybreak. I eluded a police car as it went by just on the edge of town.. for fear of the curfew by ducking down in a ditch.

I wandered through town for most of the day. It was an interesting experience. I realized I had never really been in town before, on foot, without anyone else... or some agenda. I followed the tracks for a lot of my wandering, seeing the backsides of everywhere. Eventually I had walked as far as my legs would go. I called my mom to come pick me up from a pay phone outside a restaurant. I sat there on the sidewalk and waited for her. By then the hot day that I had envisioned was well underway.

I read the book when I was in high school, but I got a lot more out of it much later. I was driving back to visit my mom and bought audio cd's of it to keep me awake. It was a twelve hour drive each direction. It reminded me of that night and I drove past and stopped at the restaurant where I had called. It was an abandoned building now. The phone didn't look like it had a receiver. On the way back from that trip I listened to the last part of the book. It talked about the town with the water tower he had been at much earlier in the book and how much at happened in between. I smiled with that thought and my pay phone.

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."

Well there is a story for you. ; )