Out of the Woods Read Free

didn’t see me. It was one of those rare moments when I could watch her unobserved, and try to see the person others saw, and not the being that love and familiarity rendered almost invisible. And so I looked at her: a tall, thin, knock-kneed girl, standing in a studied slouch, listing slightly to port with an inherent poise. I tried to imagine her four years from that moment, when I would come for her graduation, what she would be like then, how she would have changed. But I succeeded only in remembering the wild griefs and mistakes of my own college life and turned away quickly. It is a tricky business sometimes, to see your child as she is, to let her step out from behind the scrim of your own mistakes and regrets, your fierce and futile hopes for her own unmarred happiness.
    Finally the small group turned and shuffled away across the lawn. I bent my head to the road map in my lap. Woodstock, Vermont, was about two hundred miles due west, more or less, of my present location. The officially sanctioned route, as I thought of it, thereby investing it with an authority to which it had never laid claim, the one recommended by Google Maps and MapQuest, was simple, if counterintuitive: head south on U.S. Interstate Route 95 until Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then west across the state on Route 101, and then finally north on Interstates 93 and 89 until the first exit in Vermont, which would drop me about twenty miles away from what was supposed to now be home.
    This was not only the route my cell phone liked, but it was also the route recommended by that ultimate authority, the guys at the gas station. Two gas stations, in fact, the Sunoco in Woodstock, Vermont, and the Texaco in Brunswick, Maine. Both caucuses had pulled on their polite, patient “we’re dealing with a flatlander” faces when asked about alternative ways to get from one place to the other. Sure, there were other ways to get there, they said. But they’re slower. They uttered the word with emphasis and a kind of creepy finality, as if by “slower” what they really meant was “filled with things furred and fanged, lit by glimmering swamp light and haunted by the wraiths of vengeful women hunting down their faithless lovers.”
    But that afternoon, I wanted no part of superhighways relentless as time, speeding out of one map and into another. I needed those slow-poky little roads. They would be dotted with small towns and country stores and old barns, farm stands, and intersections that invited you to stop and look around, idiosyncratic places that could bolster the reassuring sense that life continued, despite the fear beginning to hammer at the back of my brain that mine had hit a wall. These roads would take their time, in a syncopated rhythm of hills and flats, orchards and pastures, villages and strip malls. They were old routes shaped by the landscape, not blasting through it, and the places that grew alongside them were testimonies in brick and wood and marble to what had mattered to the people who lived there. In their details, I would see how Maine differed from New Hampshire, and New Hampshire from Vermont. I would be passing through somewhere, rather than anywhere.
    I studied the map. That is to say, maps: I had a book of Vermont maps, and another of New Hampshire maps. (What I didn’t have was a GPS. That was cheating.) Both books chopped up each state into squares, one square to a page, none of them necessarily contiguous. Flipping back and forth among the grids, I figured out an alternative route that looked more direct and eschewed all highways. It was composed of a somewhat bewildering tangle of what were probably two-lane blacktops that unspooled like a web of thin spidery veins over a half-dozen unconnected pages. It would be a little tricky in places—New Hampshire in particular seemed dauntingly chockablock with massive lakes and mountains. But the beginning part was simple enough. I identified a