The junction of the 5 and 10 happened on both sides of town. Highways are strange like that. They join up, they split apart, and in doing, sometimes they surround things.
They built a bypass around our little town so the trucks could keep on truckin'. We called the bypass purgatory.
In the course of seventeen years you would think something might happen to make a person stay, but sometimes there's nothing to be done for that.
I can't explain why one person is called and another is called off, or why one man might be born thinking he's deaf, only to wander for a thousand miles before hearing for the first time, a faint ringing in the ears, beckoning. That faint ringing is still a thousand miles off, and each step makes it a little clearer now, even the steps that go backwards. At least, I think it's backwards. Those steps, like those highways, they seem to meet on both sides of town, and I can't get my head around it.
I wonder now, if I was walking wrong the whole time and that's why I couldn't hear the footsteps. If that's what those are. I don't know if I would known a Hammond organ from a howl at the moon at this point.
But... oh. There it is. The crisp, clean sound of the howl, making the outline of the moon into a Whiter Shade of Pale.
But any tolerable thing only lasts for three minutes at a time anyway, and the howl fades off, just like everything else. It leaves me to ask, now, this time, I can't hear anything, am I deaf now? Fortunately for me I know better than to believe my irrational self, but the silence is what deafens me until I hear the pop of another twig beneath my footstep as I walk along, trying to get back to that cabin I slept in when I was a boy. Everyone knew about the cabin, and everyone knew it was a special place, but the holiness of it keeps even me away. One day I'll come back to it, maybe to find only its ancient foundation in the place of the once majestic lodge.
The lodge is bigger than my imagination because it is encased in all the trips to it. Marching through the snow after midnight, or riding on a haywagon hitched to horses in the summer evening, or when we could drive there - when we had arrived and had the ability to supercharge anything, and we pulled up to the door in our shiny city cars. That was ages ago, and the supercharging rusted ages ago, along with the youth that followed the twisted trail to get there.
That trail through the woods begins outside my door.
