Watching the Road Rush By

It seems that as I write this “Home and Away” column week by week I spend more time writing about home than away.

Perhaps that is how it should be, because I love home so much.  I love to travel, to be sure, and in a few weeks I will be going on a sure enough adventure for an American historian, a trip to Beijing and Xian, China with several other Murray State faculty and staff members.  This will be the trip of a lifetime for me;  I will visit places that I have only read about or taught about or seen on television.

 Of course, with email and texting and international cell phone packages, it is much easier now to keep in touch with loved ones back home, and to help my family who are unable to go with me this time to experience the things that I am experiencing, at least vicariously.

I have just returned from another trip to Lexington, two within a week—one, my very first meeting of the Kentucky Oral History Commission and another, an editorial board meeting of the University Press of Kentucky.  These trips to Lexington are not unfamiliar to me, and I am never surprised by the distance.  One of the charms of Murray, Kentucky is that it is centrally located—four hours from everywhere (except, of course, Nashville).  Usually, of course, I drive myself.

Rare are the times that I have been able to sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.  During such a trip, I read for a while, but then enjoy the luxury of peering out the window at a pleasant western Kentucky landscape.

In the passenger seat, one is immediately made aware of wider vistas.  You look down on the scene, not exactly a bird’s eye view, but maybe that of a Kentucky thoroughbred.

In the late spring, the redbuds and dogwoods would be all but spent, but everything would still be fresh and green.  Looking away to a tree-lined horizon, the trees floated by with varying speeds, depending on the distance from myself.  I found it interesting that the nearer my gaze, the faster things seemed to pass by.

And then, looking down directly to the road beneath my window, the pace quickened still, the gray asphalt and white road lines rushing by, weaving in and out at a frantic, dizzying pace.

I had not watched the road rush by like this since childhood, when from a backseat window in our white Rambler station wagon, we journeyed from Texas to Oregon and then to Tennessee and eventually back to our Kentucky home.

Unencumbered in those days by seatbelts, I hugged the right rear door, and peeked past the jackets and suits hanging from a hook above the car window.  Even though the road rushed by beneath my window, back in those days, as a ten year old boy, it seemed like I had all the time in the world.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote, I had “all my road before me.”  Now, a generation later, my grown-up life has taken on a frantic and dizzying pace, much like the road rushing by beneath the car window.

While the road stretches out before Wesley and Cammie Jo, and for hundreds of recent Murray State University graduates, it seems that for Evelyn and me, at least, great chunks of road have already passed by.

On that long ago cross country trip, only when I lifted my gaze from the rushing road so near myself to the far horizon, only when my vision took in the big picture, the great wide scene, only then did the trees and fields slow down to a manageable pace.  Some of the trees almost appeared to move forward.

Despite the distance, only when I lifted my gaze could I really see.  And today, only when I lift my gaze away from myself, only then can I really see, and only then can I really live.