I want to share some experiences from a trip I took a month ago. These scenes may seem weird, but for me they were refreshing and encouraging. I think I’ve lived in the city too long.
It’s an overcast Labor Day in Quanah, where the panhandle meets northeast Texas. Nothing is moving in all of historic downtown except me and a kid on a bicycle. Nowhere here looks like anywhere anyone would want to go, even on a business day. The department store has closed down. The bookstore has two empty shelves straddling the floor at odd angles. I finish my sandwich and drive back towards the highway, past the courthouse square. As I pass the courthouse on my left, I see three men come out of the police station on my right. The first one is a tall sheriff in a ten-gallon hat and long dark brown pants. I don’t remember anything about the second one. The third is a prisoner, without handcuffs, in a baggy black-and-white-striped suit, glaring at me.
It’s late afternoon and it’s raining now, 100 miles from Dallas. I pull off for gas but the pumps are all taken. I park and wait in a long line for a sticky blue bathroom while flies and small kids circulate around me. When I get to my car again I see that the gas station next door is completely free. I guess it’s because the three gas pumps, one for diesel, one for super unleaded, one for regular unleaded, are exposed to the sky. So I drive over. The lower half of an inscription (“after 9 p.m.”) is taped to the pump, written on a lined piece of paper in blurred magic marker. It’s not raining too hard. When my tank is full I remember the amount and go inside, where the clerk puts her cigarette down in the ashtray and smiles at me. There are a couple of families waiting for their food in the next room over, a warm, ugly old diner. “$18.93,” I say, handing her a $20, since the sign in here says they don’t accept credit cards. There is a jar full of black plastic combs on the counter by the register, 49 cents each.
2 comments:
What nice sketches of passing scenes and people. It's curious that you title this post "Back in Time" even though the experiences are only a little over a month old. One does get the feeling that they are glimpses of a bygone era - like the species of an area left isolated by a passing glacier. Is it in places like this that the idea of time travel sprouted?
Truly, we are two souls who think the same thoughts. I did feel like a time traveller. Those glimpses were unexpected gifts. It wasn't that I had been longing to see a storybook prisoner, or missing the gas-station and pocket-comb experiences of my youth, but suddenly there they were, and I knew that they were things I should never have reasonably expected to see at this point in my life. I felt most highly favored.
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