Interstate Love Affair

We were coming back to Missouri from the Cascades, on a long stretch of Interstate 70 between Denver and Kansas City. I had been at the wheel for at least 16 hours. We had hit a stretch where the radio scanned in perpetuity from 87.1 to 107.9 without finding a signal. The tires had found their rut in the road, and the steering wheel had become a moot point. We had run through our conversation 800 miles ago and both had found our Zen zone, the one you only find on the deserted highways of the High Plains.

Between daydreams of my own grandeur, sometimes as fireman rushing in to save the mother and child, sometimes as rock star, giving up my millions to feed the hungry in Africa with Audrey Hepburn, I thought of how profoundly fortunate I was to have found her. That I could love her in this great green desert equidistant from the sea. That we could make our own hills along this steady horizon. That, here, we would bear witness for the rest of our lives to the finest sunsets in the world.

I looked over at her, afraid to break our precious silence, and said,

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

“Vut?”

I looked down at her lap. She had covered it with her jacket. Her hands were beneath the jacket. There was movement. Rhythmic movement.

“Hey! That’s not fair! I thought you were contemplating our love!”

“I vuz. Sort of.”

“Then how about you drive for awhile and let me diddle myself!?”

“Eww. Dat’s deesgusting.”

“Oh, but it’s perfectly fine for you to do it?”

“I am delicate voman. You are feelthy man. Velcome to vorld of double standard.”

"Well were you at least thinking of me?"

"Da. Sure."

And in those lost memories of winter wheat and roadside inns I reminisce of our youth and tenderness. Sometimes, I’ll still catch her in her old ways, a glint of her former self, perhaps trying to recapture the old dream, the long, lost journey, and I’ll turn to her softly and say,

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”