Personal:

Drive...

When I was married, I used to go out for a drive every Christmas Eve, alone. I started this when I was in graduate school in Arizona. Christmas in Arizona I suspect is much like Christmas in Australia, you’re running the air conditioner and hoping that the reindeer don’t drop out of the sky from heat exhaustion.

We lived in Phoenix, which is in the center of a huge plain called the Valley of the Sun, ringed by mountains. Over the eons that eroded into the giant basin and created a flat-bottomed valley that has occasional isolated, craggy, rocky mountain peaks rising from the almost perfect flatness like islands of rock in a sea of dust. This creates a huge hothouse effect from the inversion layers that form in the giant valley. Oddly, sometimes the air is crystal clear, usually immediately after the hot air in the valley finally breaks free from the imprisoning cooler air above. This happened one Christmas Eve, so as I drove through the night through one of the Indian Reservations I could see for miles. The Reservations had almost nothing built inside them, so even though they were on land that was at the same level as the rest of that flat-bottomed valley, some of the best views of the area could be found there.

Isolated houses were on the Reservation, and in the distance where the darkness seemed impenetrably dense I saw a small house, what we would call a shotgun-shack in Memphis, and it had red, green, blue, and yellow lights strung along the eaves. The house was isolated, nothing nearby, all alone in the night.

Years later, we lived near Portland, Oregon. One Christmas Eve, I played my “game” that I enjoyed along the narrow two-lane highway that crawled halfway up the cliff-edge on the north side of the Columbia River Gorge. I had a high performance all-wheel-drive sports car, and I enjoyed taking it out on that narrow, twisty road and take all the turns at a minimum of twice the recommended maximum speed. The 35mph turns started to be a bit touchy, but the real challenge was in the 40 and 45mph turns at 80 and 90mph.

The gorge is relatively narrow upriver of Portland, but widens out again after 40 miles or so, where a dam has been built, and a bridge across the river slightly further upstream. My route typically was to drive on the narrow winding highway on the north side (we lived north of the river), cross the bridge, and then take another narrower and even more serpentine highway on the south side. The highway on the south side had several places to stop that were at waterfalls fed by streams that arose from glaciers on Mount Hood and springs in the mountains near the base of Mount Hood. One of my favorite places in the world is Latourell Falls, where I would stop at midnight, park, and walk the quarter of a mile through the dark woods to the base of the waterfall.

Another Christmas Eve, I took a route that landed me on an interstate highway. I stopped at a truck stop to pick up a soda, and I saw the truckers eating their Christmas Eve Dinners in the truck stop cafe. There was an odd camaraderie in their isolation, each alone at their own table, or sitting on stool at the counter, with at least one stool between them, but none seeming to feel lost. They smiled at the waitress and bantered back and forth with her at midnight on Christmas Eve in a truck stop 50 miles from anywhere.

Even after my divorce, when I began to visit my parents for Christmas again, I still felt a need to go out alone for a drive on Christmas Eve. One year there had been an ice storm, the most common kind of “white Christmas” experienced in Memphis, and heedless of the danger I went for a drive. It was midnight on Christmas Eve, I had a bigger risk of getting run over by a reindeer than encountering another car. The ice storm had started early in the day, and with their customary intrepidness, drivers all over Memphis had abandoned their cars to walk, showing just how afraid of frozen water they are. When else can you get Americans to choose to walk when they could drive? As was typical in ice storms, the weaker branches of trees had broken under the extra weight of ice, creating a sad vista in tree-rich Memphis.

Even people who are not misers have ghosts of the past that haunt them.