WE GATHER TOGETHER by Edward L. Woodyard

We Gather Together Chapter Eighty-Seven

Scott McCulloch became very quiet, thinking about what he had just confessed. He opened a bottle of water and sipped from it slowly.

Maya knew better than to pursue his comment. He showed her the bottle of water, "Did you want one?"

"I'm fine, thanks." Maya started surfing the internet on her phone.

Scott stared out the windshield. He was glad to be out of the urban frenzy of Chicago and driving on a dry, straight road. The outside temperatures had been well above freezing so he wasn't worried about ice on the highway. However, the inside temperatures had cooled enough for him to put the heat on low, making the car so comfortable that he could be lulled to sleep.

He hadn't really slept in a while. His thoughts about his life and who he was and wanted to be were like an unbalanced centrifuge wobbling in alternating directions. Everything in his mind was centered on Wendy. When he met her, he had been glad to finally stop having sex with random partners. For him, it was like getting off a brahma bull and allowing himself to enjoy the rodeo from back behind the chutes.

However, after Wendy did what she did, his head became like a steel ball inside a pinball machine, orbiting the playfield, bouncing off bumpers, pegs and flippers until he pushed against it hard enough to make it "tilt," enabling him to finally sleep at night. His insomnia meant he could keep himself occupied for extended periods of time, such as driving long hours over thousands of miles to take Maya east to her new job. He welcomed the opportunity. It got his mind off of all that had happened.

Maya told Scott that since they were spending so much time on it, she had googled "I-80" on her cell phone and found a quotation from John McPhee about it. McPhee was one of Scott's favorite authors, he having decided to read as much as possible after he had denied himself a formal college degree. In determining to educate himself, he had discovered McPhee. For Scott, John McPhee was now one of the professors in his personal graduate school called life.

Maya read what McPhee had written: "'What about Interstate 80, I asked him. It goes the distance. How would it be? "Absorbing," he said. And he mused aloud: After 80 crosses the Border Fault, it pussyfoots along on morainal till that levelled up the fingers of the foldbelt hills. It does a similar dance with glacial debris in parts of Pennsylvania. It needs no assistance on the craton. It climbs a ramp to the Rockies and a fault-block staircase up the front of the Sierra. It is geologically shrewd. It was the route of animal migrations, and of human history that followed. It avoids melodrama, avoids the Grand Canyons, the Jackson Holes, the geologic operas of the country, but it would surely be a sound experience of the big picture, of the history, the construction, the components of the continent.'"

"Wow, that's impressive," said Scott. "I didn't know our little ride here was so significant, even if we're headed in the opposite direction." He then looked out the windshield and side window of the Bimmer, indicating the traffic and vehicles around them. "And I bet none of them did either."

"So, once we get to Pennsylvania, we can 'dance with the glacial debris,'" said Maya, quoting McPhee.

"In our motel room," added Scott.

"Where I'll be dancing in a shower. I cannot wait to wash my hair."