The Open Road
The Debut Essay From Senior Columnist and Novelist Fred Tribuzzo
I’ve come to prefer the open road for my morning walks.
My road, Red Brush, qualifies as a country road. Homeowners have roomy properties from a few acres to large tracts of forest, cropland and meadows. My neighbors live in postwar doubles, mobile homes, and ranches. One has an ancient plane, a two-seat Luscombe, and a grassy open field behind the home that once served as a runway. Sometimes a parked boat or an old bathtub graces a front yard, and there’s a gated mansion with rolling hills, lots of horses and a riding stable. One fella is committed to organic farming and the county’s beekeeper lives across from me and my wife. Along the road Queen Anne’s lace rises by mid-summer, and is often attended by King Chickory (my title) with his deep royal blue flowers. Milkweed and tall grass also like the sandy roadside soil. On my walk I feel particularly blessed when struck by the sudden fragrance of flowers, or the morning vision of a young mom with blue hair on her tractor and Maxfield Parish rendering the sky above.
Not far from our home a hike and bike trail stretches to local towns and beyond. It’s been asphalted, but for me the woods on either side remain uninteresting, too dark and too many bugs. Bicyclists zooming by and hitting the bell, yelling, “on the left!” are more annoying than a garbage truck rolling down Red Brush, or a large pickup truck speeding by. I navigate the rough berm and move away happily into someone’s yard to safely enjoy the sight of the pickup racing out of sight, or wave to the team manning the garbage truck. Compared to the open road, the hike and bike trail seems more like a punishment.
The edge of the road looks wounded with long ruts, eroded by rain and snow—the broken asphalt crumbling into grass and weeds. A lot like life. Walking on this uneven turf is a workout for my legs. I’ve always prided myself on their strength, which was first tested in grade school when the lunch bell rang and I spent the entire recess running from the bigger kids, performing a ballet of sudden stops, spins, and turns, rarely getting caught and roughed up.
In college, my nimble moves were utilized fighting the cops during the riots at Kent State University in the spring of 1970. Our shameful rioting brought in the National Guard which led to the death and injuries of students simply going to class. Sixties radicalism worked the concept of the open road into everything: wide open vistas of personal and societal change, going out west, killing off our parent’s influence, psychedelic road trips, unending sensation and, all the while, our music fueling the rebellion. Today the Left dreams of a world controlled from the top down, a permanent roundabout populated with electric cars and no exit.
Thankfully, by my mid-twenties I started wandering away from the leftist trenches even as radicals at Kent State began cancelling others for incorrect thinking—no conversations, no more debates in the arena of ideas. At least my pals and I had let Nixon special assistant Pat Buchanan talk when he came to the campus in the late sixties, enjoying the rowdy Q&A following his speech, dead sure that our ideas were better than his. For me this change from boisterous debate to cancelling the speaker before they even arrived was proof that the sixties had led nowhere, yet I needed the open road, longed for it, and found it learning to fly.
A small airport’s runway has an open road feel with its imperfect asphalt, often with slight dips and rises. My first airport in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, was quite short in length at 2,000 feet, yet it led to the open skies. I was fulfilling a childhood dream that began when I attempted to jump off my grandparents’ garage holding an umbrella.
Years later I’d be in the seat of a corporate jet marveling at the world below, experiencing the same excitement as that of my first solo on an overcast fall afternoon. But the excitement was always tempered by struggle, whether testing every six months for jet proficiency, or in my student years, sitting in my car after a flight, unsatisfied with my performance, going back and renting the plane for another hour.
Flying corporate, I often had hours before the passengers returned for the flight home. After I checked the weather and prepared the plane for the next leg, I had the chance to think more freely and creatively, enjoy breakfast, and scribble down the facts about the day’s flight, which eventually led to recording the conversations of other pilots and strangers I met away from home. And I always went for a walk, even if I only circled the parking lot a few times.
At a large airport in New Mexico, I turned down a lineman’s offer for a ride in his golf cart and strolled to my plane with my roller bag, catching the morning sun sparkle the bare mountains. It was a long walk to the small jet I piloted, and I took the opportunity to contemplate the best altitude for my passengers when I became aware that the world around me had become stone cold silent. No one taxied, no fuel trucks or passenger vans moved about, and no other crew members were at their planes preflighting and running their APUs (an onboard and very noisy turbine engine). I don’t remember if I stood still or kept walking, but it was a delicious moment of sky, light, and mountains. Then, as if someone had thrown a switch, all the wonderful noise of the tarmac returned.
Myself, like a lot of writers, use walking to power the creative juices. Since living on Red Brush I wrote a five-novel series: Giants on the Horizon. Cricket, the books’ heroine, in the first paragraph of the first book, is dodging gunfire racing down a country road in her ’67 Barracuda to a state park so that her great uncle can read The Declaration of Independence on July Fourth.
Her dad, great uncle, and sidekick Sister Marie, accompany Cricket as she encounters monsters along her journey in a world gone dark after an EMP attack. Her epiphanies are not unlike the disciples on the road to Emmaus, who unwittingly travel with the risen Christ for a brief time and only become cognizant of Jesus moments before he vanishes. They talk of a burning in their breasts like any of us who have had that rare brush with God.
Next door to my wife and I lived an old farm couple who passed on a few years ago. They were part of that older American tradition of working, praying, loving and dying, hopefully in the arms of their Savior. Pauline believed that she and her husband Bill would have a little cottage in heaven on the side of a mountain. She knew heaven could be quite populated and she wanted their own place and the ability to move about. The Lord can visit whenever he wants, she once told me pulling weeds in her front yard, dressed in her yellow summer dress with faded red work gloves. Bill, also interested in the next life, still liked to linger in the present one. He had said that decades ago you could walk down Red Brush Road, suitcase in hand, and get on a streetcar that would take you to the railway station in downtown Kent, continue to New York, and then over to Europe on an ocean liner. Bill had made that walk, suitcase in hand, when he began his journey in the army.
My sense is that at life’s end I’ll be making that walk down Red Brush with my hands free, and hopefully my legs strong as I navigate the road’s edge. I’ll walk and recount memories both wonderful and terrible. It’ll be dark, the wind light, and perhaps I’ll witness the first light of a new day, unlike any other, and for a final time smell the flowers of summer.