Jen
"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 good-bye.”
--Jack Kerouac, On The Road
I turn away from Jen and walk down the stairs, across the sidewalk and onto the driveway, to The Turtle parked beside her old Subaru wagon. There's a faded sticker on the side window that I hadn't noticed yesterday--"Fall Down Seven Times, Get Up Eight." I wonder if that's a skier thing, or Jen's personal philosophy. Probably both; this girl doesn't strike me as a quitter. A bit lost perhaps, and in a tough place, but not a quitter. She'll be fine.
Not yet seven, the early morning air is crisp, temp in the 20's, windows and windshields covered with a thin layer of frost, the sun barely beginning to show above the Crazy peaks to the east. I start the truck, turn the heater fan on high, pull out a credit card and begin scraping frost, starting with the rear windows. It peels off easily, falling to the ground in little curled shavings, creating an elegant white border on the concrete pavement around the truck. By the time I work my way to the front, the defroster is beginning to do its job, little half moons of clear glass beginning to appear at the windshield bottom.
I've been scraping for a while when I glance up, toward Jen's apartment, and she's still standing there, on the landing where I left her, elbows resting on the railing. She's wearing bulky wool boot socks, soccer shorts, and a blue MSU tee shirt, her hair in two thick braids, just as she'd worn when we first met at the Blue Sky. She seems deep in thought, oblivious to the cold.
I finish clearing the windshield, pat The Turtle on the hood, grab the roll cage and hoist myself into the driver's seat. I have a nagging feeling that I'm leaving something unsaid, that I should go back up the stairs and offer something meaningful and profound like they do in the movies, something she might have expected to hear from her Dad, but this is real life and I'm unable to come up with anything. Nothing at all.
I depress the clutch pedal and work the shift lever through all four gears, an old habit learned from my Dad, now a ritual. The Turtle feels warm and ready to roll. Backing into 9th Avenue I pause, look toward Jen, and touch the bill of my cap in a farewell salute. She looks at her feet, then back at me, cocks her head to the side and waves back, a timid little wave, and allows a self conscious smile. I pull away slowly, creeping down the street in first gear, watching in the rear view mirror until Jen is nothing but a tiny blue speck; finally she disappears.
We follow 9th back to Main Street, turn right, pass Montana Ale Works on the left and three blocks later the Blue Sky Motel on the right. Familiar territory. It feels as though we've been in Bozeman for weeks rather than days, barely a blip in time. We stop for gas at the same Shell station as yesterday, then let Main Street lead us back to the highway. I point The Turtle due west on Interstate 90 and edge her up to sixty. A sign tells me it's 85 miles to Butte, 204 miles to Missoula. And we're off.
“The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.”
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel