I had a hard week of trying to be cheerful and productive. I didn’t do very well.
Nick went back to school on Saturday. After he left, they closed the mountain pass he was supposed to traverse. There were accidents they needed to clear. Accidents. Plural. Suddenly, I felt paralyzed to do anything else but wait, so while Mike played video games, his Saturday morning ritual, I employed my stalker app, watched Nick’s movement, and filled the interstices with Solitaire and quiet talk about Nick’s progress.
At first, he waited at the library with a friend who was also going back to school. That part was okay. He could go tomorrow. The weather up there might get better in the afternoon. I wanted him to come back home. Mike texted him that he should wait there to see if they opened back up. They did and Nick was on his way. I watched him move at a nearly normal speed up the mountain. When he was about thirty minutes away, he stopped. We could still go get him if there was a problem, I reasoned as if we were superhuman and would be able to traverse where others had failed.
I knew my folly. I’d seen men in trucks slide sideways down a hill right after someone else had failed to get traction.
Somehow, that seemed to be the thing for me to do. I moved from Solitaire to YouTube. Videos on ice. I found what seemed like a slow-motion video of two buses, a truck with a ladder on top, a police car, and a tow truck all sliding down the same hill and piling into the same four cars at the bottom as a growing crowd watched. I repeated it three times and showed Mike one more time. It was funny. It was too slow to be too dangerous. If I had to imagine Nick doing poorly on the road, I wanted to imagine this kind of damaging but relatively painless icecapade.
“He’s moving just a little,” Mike said.
And I went back to the stalker app.
“Blip,” I said.
He was still only thirty-five minutes away on a clear day.
Then, I found a video of spinouts on a curve on an interstate in Charleston, West Virginia. The videographer stayed with each car as if he knew their fate. I could imagine a wintry Saturday night at his place, the television replaced with a row of recliners in front of a deep window where we could watch and maybe hold up little cards with a score, a ten reserved for those who spun and recovered facing the right direction without hitting a jersey barrier. It looked almost elegant from that distance.
“Blip,” Mike said. So, Nick, if he was in trouble with the interstate, was only moving at a snail’s pace. I tried to imagine walking faster. I watched another video that had many of the same clips as the Charleston one. Apparently, it was a notorious stretch of road.
“Blip. Well, he’s moving anyway,” Mike said.
Then, I watched as people spun their tires and turned their steering wheels as far as they could go in the desired direction while we, the observers, could see how ineffective that was for gaining traction. I actually laughed out loud.
“He’s made it to Hyak,” he said. It flattened out at Hyak.
We stalked him for the entire eight hour trip, Mike on an extended video game mission, and me watching YouTube videos then pretending to read and putter around the kitchen. When Nick finally, finally pulled into the parking lot of his school, I texted him: Good job, honey. Welcome back to school.
Then, I let out a long hot breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I was exhausted and went to bed early.
The next day, Mike left for a business trip to Missouri. In between sparse obligations, I spent a snowy week periodically employing the stalker app to imagine how Mike was doing as he worked half-way across the country and watching Nick as he walked back and forth to class. When I was just hanging around, I switched to watching animals on ice. It was funnier.
On Wednesday, I got into my car, despite a sheet of ice on the driveway, and slid sideways toward the highway. Somehow, I remembered how those pinned steering wheels were useless and in slow motion, I turned my wheels toward the skid and managed to come out straight and stop completely at the bottom.. Thankfully, there was no one around to record my blooper for YouTube entertainment.
Thank you for listening, jules