Light at the Friend of the tunnel
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
“It looks like the trail keeps going over there.” Her eyes pointed through the mist to a gate among the bushes. “Wanna see where it goes?”
Mom listened both ways and we rushed across the highway. After only a few steps, the bushes hugged closer and blocked out the towers, roads, and other traces of civilization. Only the smoke remained as the earth carried us upward into the orange air.
The trail was so narrow in places that lonely vines reached across it to reconnect with their leafy friends. Perhaps it hadn’t seen enough runners to finish becoming a trail yet. Or maybe it was going the other way, forgetting the paws that carved it and fading back into wilder-ness. When the hill weighed down Mom’s steps so much that running turned to walking, the brush parted and I recognized the curious triple phone tree that marks the one-mile mark on the Haunted Highway. We stepped onto the familiar balcony where ghosts look back at My Hometown one last time before the sun sucks them back to heaven.
I peered through the orange, trying to make out the places where I usually run patrol. Now that the sun was higher, I could make out the shadows of hills and the lacey whiteness where the ocean met the land. From up here, My Hometown looked more wild than not. The houses and streets that made up my life were slotted into the spaces left over between hills and ocean. I knew the Stuck House was down there somewhere, but the smoke and distance made it as invisible as a tiny, unimportant detail in all that wilder-ness.
Mom looked up the Haunted Highway with the hungry eyes of someone seeing it for the first time. “I had no idea that the trail system south of the tunnel connected back to the other trails in town,” she said. “I wonder if we could connect them all into one big run that starts and ends at our front door.”
“That would mean running a very long way to go nowhere special,” I said. “The nice thing about being from somewhere is that you don’t have to enjoy it all at once.”
“I suppose you’re right. At least not today. We’ve got to hurry or I’ll be late to work.”
Every trail changes when you run it in the opposite direction, especially when it’s on a hill. In some places, the earth was so crumbly that it lost hold of Mom’s shoes. She growled deep in her throat and punched the air wildly to catch her balance.
Scrit, Mom’s shoes said.
“Duck!” Mom shouted.
Tisk, tisk, tisk the gravel warned as Mom fell from one leg to the other trying to catch herself after tripping.
“Damned goat trail,” she growled. One of these days, Mom wouldn’t catch herself, and she’d tumble into the ocean growling last words about ducks and dog doo dragging me by the leash behind her.
“Did all of California look like this once?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Mom’s paw slipped toward another cliff. She waved her arms until her wayward paw stomped into a bush that caught its escape. “I don’t know how they got covered wagons over this terrain.”
“The wagon trains didn’t travel in lines like roads, right? They followed the earth like trails do.”
“Sure. But eventually we got better at making straight lines to get places faster. That’s called progress.”
“I bet that’s why everyone is so peevish lately,” I decided. “Because the road they usually take is blocked, and now it’s an emergency because they’re gonna be late. What does progress do when there’s a mountain in the way?”
“They use machines to cut through it. Like the tunnel they built to avoid landslides.”
“So when your path keeps getting blocked, the answer is to hide underground where nothing dangerous can reach you?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Mom corrected. “Progress is solving a problem that keeps happening rather than just living with it. I would think that a life coach like you would know that already.”
“I thought that maybe the lesson was that sometimes it’s best to stay safe underground until the danger has passed. That’s why they told everyone to hide at home.”
“Tunnels aren’t meant to be shelter,” Mom corrected again, forgetting that something can be two things at once depending on the problem. “You’ve got to come out on the other side eventually.”
“Exactly,” I said, so that we were both right. “The answer isn’t always to get over it. Sometimes you just have to get through it. Maybe the reason everything has been so hard lately is because we’re not getting over it, we’re tunneling to the other side. When we do break through, perhaps we’ll look back to the old way from a different direction and find beautiful things we couldn’t appreciate before. Don’tcha think?”
“I guess. But today it’s hard to see anything nice. This whole year has felt like a knee on our necks and I’m out of breath from all the running away.” Mom let her eyes drift up the caged mountain toward the orange sky. “We can’t dig that tunnel by ourselves. It’s one of those things that can only be finished when everyone’s tunneling in the same direction. And I’m losing patience with all this division.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure the tunnel-building people always finish their projects quickly and without drama, since everyone is depending on them.”
“I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the concept of government.”
