Road to Bountiful (7 page)

The sense of pace. The peace of slowness. He is beginning to understand lessons that the plains had taught me. I again join him in looking up.

It was then that a silvery white dot of light burst across the sky, moving impossibly fast, producing no sound, making a wild ride across the sky. It seemed to make everything on earth stand still and fall to silence and seem small. We had seen a shooting star, nothing uncommon in North Dakota at that time of the year, but apparently something rarely seen by my great-nephew.

“Wow. Whoa. Wow. Dude, did you see that?”

“I did. Yes.”

“I can’t ever remember seeing anything like that. That was awesome.”

“It was spectacular.”

“I’ve never, never seen one like that. Not at all.”

Slowly, he rises from the car hood, our time gazing at stars now capped by an event most memorable. The air smells both sweet and musty. We open the car doors and slide into our places in the front seat.

Levi starts the engine but does not put the car into gear. In the dim light that comes from the dashboard, he turns toward me.

“I wonder what it’s like to be a shooting star,” he says.

An unusual thought, certainly. But I am happy to hear it. “I think you already know something of it.”

He puts the car in gear and presses his foot on the accelerator, and we merge back on to the highway. “Well, we’d better try to make up for lost time. We have a long bit of road ahead of us,” he says, and the red car moves down the highway at a faster clip.

“I’m enjoying this. All of it. The trip. The drive. The company.” My words come back to him in the humid air, tinged with the peculiar fragrance of dampened corn, near to ripe. I’m not quite sure of the implications, not understanding the idiom of the young, but I enjoy being called “dude” by him. The tone of our trip is changing. It is becoming a journey. And I think this: we have much to learn from each other.

A few more seconds pass before I have the perspicacity to add, “And we have many miles to go.”

And I Worried about Uncle Loyal Being the One Who Was Nuts

I told Uncle Loyal, sure, let’s pull onto the driveway and look at the stars. The little voice whined in my mind:
Remember the fat paycheck at the end of the road, Levi.
When you waste time, you waste money. That was Levi the man of business speaking. But Levi the human being fortunately took control. I enjoyed the experience. Give him credit. The old fellow did seem to know tons about the stars. Did you know that Orpheus played the harp really well? The guy must have
rocked.

So there we were on the side of the road, spread out on the car hood, looking up at the stars, and Uncle Loyal was pointing out some constellations, and I was thinking,
I can’t see much, and I’ve probably had about all I can handle in the way of Dakota culture for one afternoon and evening
. Next thing we’d be stopping at the Cornfields of Mystery, or Wheat fields of Wonder, or some other such roadside attraction, and I’d be buying postcards to send to my friends and let them know what an amazing time I was having.

Then I started to see the patterns, and things began to click for me. So much to see and understand, and I hadn’t taken the time to notice. Uncle Loyal had already talked about the slowness of all things, two or three times, and honestly, I thought it was just one of those things nice old guys say. But I now get part of what he means: you
do
see more when you’re going slow. Then I saw the star, the shooting star, and for a moment I forgot about where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what was important to me. I even forgot about the money I was earning on this quick trip. The shooting star was amazing, much more so than any I’ve seen back home, maybe because the lights are bright there and we never hardly look up.

I have to say it. The shooting star
inspired
me.

And—not to sound too whacked out here—I wondered if I could be my own shooting star in a nice, normal kind of earthly LDS way.
Loyal is getting inside your head, Levi.

Talk to yourself, Levi. Work through this.
Okay. The point is, I’m on track for a lot of things—the mission is over, I’m about to start my last year at school, I have Rachel interested in me and me interested in her, at least I think that’s the way it shapes up, and I know I want to be
successful
, but I’m still pulled in different directions. I get pulled in the direction of earning money, having a job with prestige and pizzazz, trophy home, trophy wife, trophy kids, trophy cars, trophy church calling, trophy everything—anything to be above and stand out from others. To be someone. Is that a crime? And then I see that star and think it’s what I want to be without being any of it all. It’s clear, its course is straight, you can see it but you need to know where to look for it, and when you see it, you admire it, but it does nothing to call attention to itself. It’s just there. It’s
pure,
and there are no trophies in sight. It’s just there
.
For anyone to look at, if you know
where
to look at the
right
time.

Okay, am I a little nuts here? I worried about Uncle Loyal not having dry mortar between his bricks, but I’m the one who looks at him and says, “See that star? I want to be like it.” I want to be a bursting ball of white light in a dark sky. Like a four-year-old who says he wants to be a cowboy or a fireman or a professional basketball player. Me? I want to be a shooting star.

So I sit behind the steering wheel, and I think of what has taken place in the last few hours of my life. I take inventory. I do a little cost accounting. I add things up.

I saw a shooting star and thought I wanted to be like it, which about pegs me off the weirdness meter.

Uncle Loyal fed me a ham sandwich, and it got to me. Who eats a ham sandwich and comes away thinking he’s had a significant emotional experience? Me, just me. That’s who.

I know what Vega and Altair are, and I think I can find Cygnus on my own. Before tonight, I thought they might be a heavy metal band.

I drove through a crashing storm and saw lightning licking down in cornfields and thunder that sounded like a freight train blasting two inches from my toes.

And I’m not thinking as much about the easy six hundred awaiting me soon after I cross into Davis County and head up the hill to Aunt Barbara’s mansion on the ridge.

All of this in a few short hours, with my Uncle Loyal. What if I
do
slow this trip down? How much more would I have to talk about? How many more stars would I see? How many stars and constellations am I missing by going too fast and bracketing my life in dollar signs? How many more stories would I have to tell? How much more would I learn?

And maybe when my friends all started talking about their summers, the jobs they had, their experiences, when they started to shake and bake a little in front of me, I’d just think,
Yeah, but I was with Loyal, and you can’t match that, no way man.
Smug.

My career as a boxboy is over. I have latched on to my last mop and cleaned up after little Junior Short Pants for the last time. I have endured my last complaint about the asparagus being crushed by the canned corn or the bananas being too green or the price of lettuce being too high, as if I had any control over it
.

Here is the hint, memo to self: Enjoy your time with Uncle Loyal.
The man is a beast.

I start the car, a thousand thoughts billowing through my mind. Then one thought comes clear, takes hold, and before I know it, I’m asking Uncle Loyal a question that would have been astonishing to me earlier in the day.

“Do you mind if we slow down on this trip? Stretch it out a little? I’m really in no hurry. We’ve got time.”

He gives me that old owl look in the dim light of the car. He scrunches his lips together and gently drums his fingers on his slacks. The gears are turning. I can hear them.

“Not at all, Levi. Not in the slightest. Slow down and gain. That’s what I say.”

We Decide to Make It a Trip Worth Remembering, Starting with My Friend Glenn

Well. I am surprised. Pleasantly so. Levi seems to be more friendly and thoughtful, or at least thinking more, with every hour we spend together on this long road.

He told me that we’d slow the pace down, take in some sights, be more casual in our travels. He asks me if there was anything I’d particularly like to do.

A good question for a man my age. One must be selective, putting every day to some good use. I certainly have little time to squander. An idea takes form. It has been on my list for many years.

“Something, maybe. Something I’ve been thinking of for a long time, something I should have done a few years back, when I was younger and more healthy and able to get around better.”

“Just tell me. As long as it isn’t too far out there, Uncle Loyal.”

“I’d like to see my old friend Glenn Leuthold.”

“Does he live far out of the way? Not that it matters. We have time, remember? Time. Lots of it. We have it. Time we have, time is us. Am I starting to talk like Yoda?”

“He is a little out of the way. He’s in a small town in northeastern Montana.”

“Montana? We need to pass through there anyway,” Levi says agreeably. “What’s a little detour? Your pal Glenn in Montana. It can be done.”

“Thank you. Do you have some maps? We can chart our course.”

“No maps. Just a little cheap one they gave me when I rented the car, but nothing of Montana. Let’s stop. We can stop when we get to the state line; there must be one of those visitor center dealios where they hand out maps. We are now officially tourists.”

“You must know something about Glenn . . .”

“Look, man, we’re going to get you to Glenn’s, no questions, no statements, no buts about it, you will be shaking hands with your pal in no time.”

“It’s not quite possible to—”

“
Uncle Loyal! Enough!
”

“Okay, but . . . I yield to your indomitable will, Levi. To Glenn’s.”

“To Glenn’s and not another word about it. It’s a plan. Will Glenn be at home? I hate to drive a long way and find out your friend isn’t there. That would be a major disappointment.”

“Oh, he’ll be there. I’m not worried. Glenn doesn’t get around much.”

Glenn and I became acquaintances, then friends, many decades ago, somewhere around junior high school years. I first remember him from Mrs. Jansen’s English class. To this day, I still quiver when I think of Mrs. Jansen, the perfect caricature of a schoolmarm. Tall, stern, bosomy, thin glasses, hair in a bun, pinned the same way each day. She had five dresses that she wore to school, one for each day of the week. I still recall them—plain, coarse woolen garments, one gray, one black, one blue, one a darker gray, and the last a darker blue. You could look at her dress and know exactly which day of the week it was: Dark gray? It is Thursday.

She was a large woman, starch fed, a commanding presence, queen of her domain, and we students, her peasants, to do with as she pleased. She suffered no fools, and fools we all were. I can still hear the clop, clop, clop of her sturdy, sensible, black shoes pacing the aisles between our desks, her hawk eyes missing nothing. Her tongue was sharp, her wrath unbearable. Those who endured her class forged a bond and a closeness that only comes with survival of harsh elements, those who experienced something akin to death yet lived to tell about it.

Although credit her with this: we could parse sentences in our sleep, repeat precisely the definition of a gerund, participle, and adverbial clause, and would rather suffer a slow, tortuous passing than split an infinitive in her presence.

I was chief among her fools, although all of us felt her righteous indignation. We were fodder for Mrs. Jansen’s grammarian blasts. Of all her pupils, though, Glenn had the greatest knack for grammar. Though far from being the teacher’s pet—Mrs. Jansen had none, her wickedness allowed no favorites, her heart no tender mercies—he emerged from her class the least bruised and bloodied.

Mrs. Jansen’s most terrifying teaching ploy was to call out five names, bark out five sentences, and send the quavering students to the chalkboard to diagram a sentence. On a grim, fall Dakota morning, my name was among the unfortunates. To this day, more than sixty-five years later, I recall the sentence she assigned me: The pilot flew his plane high above the cornfields but beneath the layer of clouds.

I trudged to the board, unsure of where to begin, other than recognizing the starting point:
pilot
, the noun. In a rare lapse of concentration, Mrs. Jansen trudged back to her desk and was distracted by a pile of papers lying on it. Face to the blackboard, chalk in trembling hands, I wrote
pilot
. I turned slightly. From the corner of my eye, I saw Glenn mouth the words “flew his plane” and nod slightly toward where the phrase needed to be placed. A couple more deft hand signals and a tiny jerk of his head, and my sentence was on the board, completed.

And completed correctly.

“I am surprised, Mr. Wing. But in a good way. Our hard work seems to be paying off,” Mrs. Jansen said moments later when reviewing my effort. It was the closest brush to praise her dark soul would allow. “You may have more than thistledown between the ears. Surprised. Yes, I am.” I stammered a thank-you and took my place behind my wood-and-iron school desk.

At that moment, I knew I had a friend in Glenn Leuthold.

Through the years, we gathered together many more memories, and our friendship took on a depth to match a swelling ocean. We became friends, then buddies. Glenn was the skinny, smooth-shooting forward on our raggedy high school basketball team; I was one of the starting guards. We rode our horses to school together until our junior years, his a buckskin, mine a little gray. We double-dated the Hecht sisters, Judy and Lois, to the prom our senior year, ending up at the Leutholds’ house in the late hours of the night, laughing, playing board games, drinking root beer floats, and feeling, perhaps for the first time, a bit like adults in those simpler, cleaner times.