Wallace, ID 6/20/16

An interlude from here to there.

We drive down from the mountains, riding the summer air that carries the scent of pine canopies through the car’s open window. The road ripples. We steer the wave and take the exit like we’re rolling over rapids, quick and clean and smooth as fish slipping the stream.

The tarmac of downtown stirs the air above it like the surface of a shallow pool and we wade through in our uniforms of stiff denim and faded flannel watching a parade of flags rustle in the rising heat.

We’d ridden to the sun and back and lived to tell the tale, reminiscing about the days just hours behind us as though they were the making of the men we’d become, returning from an odyssey neither one of us had foreseen.

There’s an audience of stuffed animal heads from the decades before our arrival lining the wall above the liquor bottles of a downtown bar, observing us drink our midday beers. Weary from a dawn departure, the cold suds revive our spirits. That gallery of glass eyes glistens in the sunlight that streams across the walls as the old door opens and closes with each guest stopping by for a moment; a mix of locals that’ve mined their lives in this town and travellers passing through between the coast and the inland ranges.

Down the street, a store sells dead men’s clothes and castoffs from other lives whose ghosts stir beneath my fingertips as they trace the dusty garments and objects piled into the cramped space that sells live bait in the back.

We are here. In a small town on a summer day that sears its setting into memory. A place you can visit any time you like but never truly go back to again.

Slamming the hot metal and sealing ourselves back into our ride, we set off from the curb back up to the highway, catching a fresh breeze that we ride out the state towards the coast and the new lives waiting to be lived.