1.

Because we started late on the first leg of our journey, we rescinded our rule about avoiding the interstates for the first two hundred miles or so. Southern Michigan slid away on either side of the car, and eventually we drove out of fitful snow enough to see the sun setting on our right. It was dusk, and we probably saw a hundred deer in cornfields beside the expressway. At one point a pheasant flew low over the road ahead of us. Geese also crossed our path a time or two, and I wondered if they were already flying back north.

When we got close to Fort Wayne, Indiana, I called my friend Allan who had been my roommate when I studied for a semester in Oxford. He lives in Fort Wayne and attends Taylor University, and when I told him about our road trip we had planned for Jon and me to stop by and see him for a bit. He was at home, but his wife and thus his transportation was at work.

“I’ll have Megan call and give you directions from the expressway,” he told us when we called ahead. “She knows the way better than I do.”

He must have been right, because Megan gave us explicit directions for abandoning the freeway and finding Allan in a neighborhood of stately old houses. Fort Wayne itself reminded me quite a bit of Flint, rather industrial and neglected, a town of brown angles and entropic homes. We passed through downtown, noticed quite a few elegant churches, and wondered if we should stop to take pictures of the huge courthouse. Jon had brought an old Pentak camera that he was quite proud of and hoped to document much of our trip in photographs. We passed it by though, following the directions through the town and into a quiet neighborhood where the houses were stone and set far back from the road.

“I hope he lives in one of those,” Jon said, and I nodded.

We missed our turn, wandered into a neighborhood quite less impressive, and finally doubled back to find Allan standing in front of a beautiful white house with blue shutters in the nice neighborhood. We pulled up and rolled down the passenger window.

When my friend Allan talks his hands are always in motion, and most of the time that motion involves pushing his mop of dark hair off his forehead and out of his eyes. He leaned down to the window, pushed the hair away, and said, “Good Lord, Steve, you never told me you had a Firebird.”

“You never told me you lived in such a nice neighborhood.” It was really quite a nice neighborhood. Some of the homes just a street over would have easily qualified as mansions. “This is my friend Jon. Where should I park?”

We parked only long enough to rearrange the luggage so that there would be room for Jon to sit in the back and Allan could ride up front with me. I had assumed we were simply stopping by to pay Allan a visit, but he explained that the disabled professor they lived with and were caring for was often quite irritable, and something like guests should not be sprung on him at the last moment. Instead we would go to Starbucks where his wife Megan worked.

Sometimes I think I am friends with Allan simply to listen to him talk. He does it rather well, rather frequently, and rather unceasingly. And it’s not the kind of talking that really ever gets on your nerves because it’s usually all so intelligent. As we drove back through Fort Wayne the way we came, Allan explained that the city was known as the city of churches, pointing out some of the more conspicuous ones we passed.

At Starbucks we ordered drinks and greeted Allan’s wife, and Jon was almost immediately called away by his cell phone. This would mark a trend throughout our road trip, the daily calls from his fiancée. It was never an annoyance though, because it always gave me some time to be alone with my thoughts or to call my own fiancée. At this juncture it gave me time to sit and listen to Allan explain what was wrong with having a Christian worldview.

I’m sure that’s not exactly what he was saying. He was saying something about why the very notion of a worldview implies that Christians must somehow justify their view to others. I never seem to catch all of what Allan says when we talk, but I always come away with thoughts that somehow seem more straightened and clear. Allan always apologizes for talking too much, and I always brush it aside. He’s a theology major, hoping to study at an Orthodox seminary in New York next year. Right now he and his wife are between denominations, definitely broken with the evangelical tradition and not yet part of the Orthodox. I try to explain him to Jon in the car after we’ve left, but I probably fail. He is Allan.

* * *

The road from Fort Wayne to Anderson was what all expressways are at night. We talked, and I watched the taillights of the cars in front of me drifting like embers. In Anderson, Jon showed me the house where he lived. His father was a minister, and so I’ll be seeing a few more towns on this trip that were once his home. We drove through his neighborhood, passed his old high school, and tried to find the address of friends he once knew. He’s getting married this summer and wants to send them wedding invitations.

It’s strange how a town can change, how it can be something different on the inside and on the out. I was tired and quickly losing interest in the circles and repetitive subdivisions. This town seemed to have been dropped into corn fields only to be manicured slowly into suburbia. And yet if we were in my town at night, if I were showing Jon all the places I had known through high school, it would be completely different for me and the same for him. It would be just another town at night, another set of unfamiliar streets holding no interest to a stranger. But to me all the shadows would be softened with familiarity, and the roads would hold well-known contours. My town could be any town, and yet there is only one town that is my own.

We made it to Nate’s house that night. The back door was unlocked, and we wandered through a large house to the finished basement where our friend lives. His parents were asleep, but Jon had grown up with this family and felt completely at home. He and Nate played pool and I fell asleep on the leather couch watching television and listening to their game.

I woke up to voices. “Should we take his glasses off for him?”

“I’m awake guys. I’m awake.”

It’s a lie though. I took off my glasses and promptly fell back asleep.

The Middle Roads: Prologue

Middle Roads:
Our Spring Break Road Trip

[This account will be published as a "serial" with one chapter published a week until it's done or until I lose interest and no one reminds me.]

This is the trip that Jon and I had been talking about since we decided we would not go to Florida for spring break. This is also the trip we took when we realized that riding motorcycles to California was not practical. Eventually we realized that perhaps California was out of the question all together, and so that trip receded into dream and this trip became reality. Because we needed a trip. All our friends would be somewhere south in a condo, spending the days in a house or on a beach, and the two of us wanted instead to travel. We eventually decided that Jon would come home with me for the first weekend of spring break, and we would use the week to make our way to his house in Georgia, stopping to see friends along the way.

Our idea was to meander through pieces of the country we had never seen before. We imagined the highways lying like a vast web across the country, linking city to city with pavement. These were what we called the High Roads, the roads that we always drove to get us to school and back. These would not be good enough for this road trip, because we felt you could never see enough of the country from them. They hung over the lands aloof.

We were looking for the Middle Roads, the Old Roads. We wanted the highways that people used before there were expressways, the roads that actually tied the towns together by winding through them. We imagined these roads stringing small, forgotten towns together like pearls on a chain, stretching all the way through the Midwest, revealing country churches and tiny shops and all the things people miss by driving the interstate. These were what we would travel on our road trip. We called them the Middle Roads to distinguish them from the back-roads of gravel and dirt like the one I lived on that we called Low Roads.

This is in the Episcopalian prayer book:

Almighty God, we beseech thee to look with favor upon our land and people. All undeserving, thou hast made us great among the nations of the earth. Let us not forget that this place and this power have come of thee, and that we have them as a trust to use in thy service. Save us from pride and arrogance; make us quick to see the needs of those less fortunate than ourselves, and to be resolute in purpose to promote goodwill and fellowship among all men; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is what was said about people:

. . . And this constant sundering and forging seems at times so arbitrary,
without direction, that this knot of relationships and relations
couldn't possibly be the real thing, not really.

It's like I'm this huge railway station and some trains just don't run anymore.

This is the drawer marked "people I've forgotten" and this is the drawer marked "friends".
They're both very large and frightening.

I wish I could tell you I did it all on purpose,
But I don't recall a single friend I ever made intentionally.
Or anyone I forgot like that (maybe a few).