Leaving Massachusetts is rarely easy. This time it was tearful goodbyes with my parents in front of the garage. It was watching my mom in the rearview run up the driveway, both arms waving me off. In all my efforts to prepare for the trip, to build a bed frame in the back of my SUV, and to stock up on a month’s worth of nonperishables, I had forgotten to fill up the gas tank. Remembering when mice had burrowed their way up through the engine block, out the glove compartment, and into my food stash during my 2018 road trip, I also realized I was woefully underprepared to prevent and combat potential rodent intrusions into the car. I stopped for gas at the Mobil station just down the street where I used to beg my parents to stop and buy me a donut growing up. Another mile down the street, I stocked up on mouse traps and peppermint-scented pouches at the hardware store. As kids, my sister and I would collect paint sample cards every time my parents brought us in.
Finally, I was on the highway. I-93 to I-495, the exact same way countless other drives had begun. I hopped off the highway in Hudson at an outdoor outfitter to buy red fox urine. It’s typically marketed to hunters as a means to mask their human scent. However, it also does an excellent job making the bottoms of my tires smell like a predator for mice, scaring them off before they get a whiff of all the food I have on board and try to climb up. The clerk rang up the sale and asked idly if I was dealing with a rodent problem. “Not yet. Just trying to be proactive,” I told him.
A state route took me out to I-84, which pulled me southeast towards Connecticut. Hartford appeared on the horizon and faded just as quickly as it had come. Western Connecticut gave way to New York with no real fanfare or changes in scenery. 84 crossed the Hudson River at Newburgh. From the middle of the bridge, the river stretched out lazily, reflecting a few tufts of cloud hanging miles above. The bridge itself was a rust-colored cantilever behemoth, its supports rising and then falling again to trace an arch as lazy as the river itself.
Occasionally, the highway crested a rise and offered an expansive view of the verdant New York hills rolling to their chiaroscuro finale miles in the distance. At Port Jervis, I crossed the anemic Delaware River, which offered no hint of the major waterway it becomes 125 miles south near Philadelphia. New York melted into Pennsylvania as the highway numbers subtracted: I-84, 81, and finally 80, a nearly 3,000-mile long river of asphalt running from New Jersey to San Francisco.
Déjà vu reared its head outside Scranton when I left the interstate in search of gas, only to find myself at a truck stop gas station I’d filled up at two years earlier. It was unmistakably perched high up on a hill and had mildly confusing signage directing trucks to the diesel and cars to the unleaded. At an I-80 rest stop, I got out to use the bathroom. Flyers on the doors reminded me that masks were required in public. Everyone was obeying. The bathroom attendant had left their phone number written on the door; they were hiding somewhere in the name of social distancing but could be reached if need be.
Back in my car, I sat for a few minutes to have lunch. It was a steak tip salad my mom had packed into the cooler before I left, a final gourmet indulgence before the steady stream of road food began. I pushed on across Pennsylvania, the scenery becoming more agrarian at every turn. The road was eerily empty. 18-wheelers were out in force but I hardly passed or was passed by any other passenger vehicles. It was easy driving.
I pulled into Lock Haven around 8 pm. I’d spent a night there two years before in December and figured it was as good a place to spend the night as any. About 10 miles off the interstate, Lock Haven sits on the south bank of the West Branch Susquehanna River. Just across the river, there’s a large parking lot with public restrooms and a boat launch. In December, I’d been the only car in the lot, looking out across the river at what almost seemed like a ghost town. Now, in mid-July, I realized that my summer stay would not be the same as the winter one. The parking lot was packed full of lifted pickup trucks and beat up sports cars. Country music was blasting from a car stereo and a few dozen high schoolers were hanging out in lawn chairs they’d perched up on the beds of their trucks. The guys were nearly all shirtless and the girls had seemingly coordinated to wear the same stereotypically Americana combination of flannel shirts and jean shorts. There were red solo cups, American flags, and trucks rigged up with a bizarre assortment of colored lights, like some sort of rust belt Christmas tree. You wouldn’t have guessed the country was in the midst of a pandemic.
I parked off to the side and walked back across the river just as the sun was starting to go down. The bridge led right to the foot of the Clinton County courthouse, which dominates the city’s skyline on the south bank. A levee runs along the riverbank to keep its waters at bay. Although flooding has wreaked havoc on the city in the past, the river was flowing slowly and benignly under the oppressive summer heat. I climbed up to the paved walking trail that tops the levee and watched the sky glow red above the hills that loomed just beyond the river. A kayaker rowed by and a small dog yipped from the front tip of the boat. A quick walk around the area around the courthouse brought me past a series of row homes and apartment buildings that had clearly seen their heyday at last a hundred years earlier. I imagined how the area must have looked when the buildings were still new, before the paint chipped off, before the windows were broken and patched with trash bags, before the doorknockers had been ripped off to scar each entrance way. No cars passed. A couple sat silent on their stoop. The box fans and air conditioning units above me hummed a classic summer tune.
Fading twilight over the West Branch Susquehanna River
I left downtown to return to my car, crossing the river once more. The sky was on fire, the kind of sunset that stops you in your tracks. I stepped off the bridge onto the north bank and even before my sleeping spot came back into view, I could hear it. I walked along the side of the sidewalk-less road. On the far side of the river, a string of streetlights came on, abruptly illuminating the entire front edge of downtown. On the near side of the river, a cluster of fireflies responded in kind, dancing around my ankles.
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