The Road To Repair

The intersection was dry as dust and shimmering with heat. There were no lights, just a ragged 4 way stop sign hanging by a splintered thread. In one of the weedy, waterless ditches, I discovered an unpainted wooden marker in the shape of an arrow, covered with dried mud and brown grass, with a single hand lettered word scrawled - on both sides - in what looked to be paint. Repair, it read. I tossed it back into the ditch and it landed with a sharp crack, raising a tiny cloud of brown, brackish looking dust and disturbing a mound of fire ants.

There wasn't, I realized, a sign of life - not a single farmhouse or fence as far as I could see, not a mile marker or broken down chimney, not a telephone wire or mailbox or billboard. There might have been birds but there were no trees and the only sound was a faint wind rustling through the tractorless cornfields. This is what they were thinking when they invented the word desolation, I thought to myself, and loneliness. I climbed back into the old borrowed truck and started the engine, played eeny,meeny, miney, mo to choose a direction and headed west. It was straight up noon.

I'd left Portsmouth that morning with no destination except away from the man I had married, crossed the border into Maine and kept driving, turning off the turnpike at Scarborough and heading north then west, inland and into the country. I had a change of clothes, a six pack of Coke, my credit cards - but I'd intentionally left the maps on the kitchen counter - no need to make it easier for him to follow, I remembered thinking, and besides I wanted to get lost for awhile, needed some time alone to sort myself out, to decide what next. The anger had burned itself out by the time I reached the dusty, unmarked intersection but the hurt was still fresh. I decided it was best to keep driving, to see where the road would take me by the end of the day. It was high summer on a cloudless day and the miles flew by mindlessly.

The next intersection, some forty miles down the road, was a carbon copy of the first - no lights, no signs, and

cornfields on every side, but no indication of life anywhere. It was as if I'd driven into an endless countryside where corn grew without tending, without water, without human intervention. It wasn't possible, of course, but I was beginning to think that life as I knew it didn't exist in this part of Maine and it took some effort to shake off the feeling that the corn was watching my progress, waiting for a mistake or an opportunity. Hitchcock would've loved this, I thought to myself as I recalled the scene from "North by Northwest" where Cary Grant has to flee into the corn to escape the murderous crop dusting plane. I had a hazy, far off feeling that the corn agreed and cursing my over active imagination, I prepared to drive on, then at the last minute decided to take a quick look in the ditch.

The arrow shaped marker was neatly split in two pieces, held together by weeds and tangled, dry brush, lying at a crooked angle but its chipped black paint still legible - Repair, I read outloud, and unaccountably felt a chill in the warm summer air. Enough! I told myself sharply, already regretting the urge that had drawn me to the foul smelling ditch and the sad, abandoned marker, Get a grip! Impatient and unsettled, I climbed back into the truck and drove on.

I reached the third intersection in the late afternoon. As I expected, there were no lights, no trees, no signs and still no evidence of life beyond the corn. This time, the Repair marker hung vertically from a stray strand of rusty wire stretched across the ditch. I watched it swinging back and forth over a bed of cornstalks and dead leaves and

without consciously summoning it, an image from childhood flashed through my mind - Poe's story of "The Pit and the Pendulum" and a wildly mad Vincent Price about to extract his revenge on an innocent victim. For a moment or two I was frozen with something very like fear then just as suddenly I was back, on a late, lazy summer afternoon somewhere in Maine at a scorched, deserted intersection with nothing more frightening that the lack of a map, the faint stirrings of a headache and an imagination locked in overdrive. Back in the truck, I turned east toward the coast, feeling a sudden and urgent need to see the ocean and breathe salt air, to hear the hum of telephone wires and the cries of gulls. With the sun to my back I turned toward the darkening sky and accelerated until the corn fields began to blur in passing. The thought came to me that I'd been running all day and gotten nowhere - that it was possible, even likely, that flight might provide a temporary reprieve but that it wasn't going to solve trouble on the road or at home. I'd covered a lot of distance and run up a lot of miles in a day but everything except the geography was the same.

The Maine coast came into view just after dark, not long after the last cornfield had disappeared and the dirt road turned into narrow, two laned pavement with streetlights at regular intervals. I began passing houses, then small villages, then to my surprise at having come so far north, the lights of Bar Harbor. I spent the night there, in a rambling old farmhouse that had been converted to a bed and breakfast high on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic.

I listened to the ocean and thought about going home, about what I might say and what I would find, about how he would greet me, if he'd even noticed I was gone much less thought to look - by morning, this last thought had brought a fresh urge to turn north again rather than south - then I remembered the cornfields and the desolation, the silence of those intersections, the lack of life, and decided no, I would head for home and come what may, find my own Road to Repair.