15 Miles in the Dark

When I was in High School my family lived in the small town of Sun, Louisiana on the St. Tammany/Washington Parish line. It wasn’t much of a town, in fact Wikipedia calls it a “village”. Population 400, there was a water tower, a gas station, a bait shop, a tiny wood framed church, and the city hall. We had a “police chief” but he didn’t wear a uniforms, spent half his time reading water meters and responded to calls in the town water truck. It’s 11 miles South of Bogalusa, 19 Miles North of Covington, 63 miles from New Orleans, and 1500 miles and a lifetime South of Boston. No one knows where Sun, Louisiana is unless they have a reason, and damn few people have a reason.

This was in the ancient times, when the driving age was still fifteen and eighteen year olds could still buy beer in Louisiana. When I was fourteen my mom began allowing me to drive home from town and it was on the highways to and from Sun, Louisiana that I learned how to drive while I was still, technically, in middle school. . When I was fifteen we went to the DMV in Bogalusa so I could take my road test and within an hour I left with a driver’s license without ever having to parallel park. During my Junior year of High School I was allowed to drive my mom to work, then take the car to school and return to pick her up after class. I’m pretty sure the first time I drove to school alone was during the May Floods of 1995. I was behind the wheel of my dad’s manual transmission S10 pickup, driving on flooded roads in a torrential downpour and lucky to have survived.

My brother was a Freshman during my Senior year and I’m absolutely certain that’s why I was allowed to drive every day. With extra curricular activities and errands it just made sense that, in exchange for keys to the truck, I became his chauffeur. It proved to be an error. Mom never quite understood how much of a burgeoning dirt bag I was. She didn’t know how much I liked to smoke and didn’t realize at the time that I was having my baby brother light my cigarettes while he sat in the passenger seat. Even I didn’t realize that from time to time he’d sneak a drag, not that I would have cared, he would have gotten to it in his own time, but I’m the reason my baby brother started smoking in the 9th grade.

To finance my growing dirt baggery, I got a job at a strip mall pizza joint in Covington. For the first few months I was still sixteen and couldn’t work the late nights but by Halloween I'd turned seventeen, it became legal for me to work until closing and I did at least three nights a week. I can, and probably will, tell you stories about older, divorced, waitresses, free credits on the pin ball machines, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and free access to keg beer during closing, but for now I want to talk about that long drive home after midnight.

Covington isn’t a big town today but it was much smaller then, before Hurricane Katrina and the mass white flight from New Orleans. The suburbs hadn't all grown together and there was distance between Covington, Mandeville and Abita Springs in those days. They still rolled up the sidewalks by ten, so the roads were empty and the traffic lights would be flashing red or yellow after ten pm. There weren’t a lot of cops and my high school best friend’s dad was a night shift sergeant so I didn’t worry too much about things like speed or noise ordinances. I’d get off of work, or drop my buddies off in town and then I’d face that long, long drive home by myself with FM radio, a tape deck, and a pack of Marlboro’s as my only company.

There were only street lights on the main roads in town. The side streets were lit by porch lights and the highways were lit by little more than the moon and stars. Coming straight from work I’d drive North on Highway 21. It was a two lane highway, flanked first by low, hardwood thickets, and then long, straight, rows of pine. There were houses, even a subdivision, along the route but they were tucked back behind the trees where they couldn’t be seen from the road. Even today it feels like stepping back in time a little as you drive the route at night. There’s a few Cajun cottages hidden behind wrought iron gates along Highway 21 just North of Covington. Then there’s a graveyard, an old wood framed Methodist Church and an ancient country store in Waldheim. Past that there was little else but dark gravel driveways until I reached the small town of Bush.

When I dropped friends off in town I’d have to wind through the narrow, tree lined back roads, past a Catholic Abby and what my protestant brain can’t help but think of as a “nunnery.” The roads were so narrow and the live oaks that lined them so large that their canopy blocked out the moon and stars and it felt like driving through a tunnel until I reached the intersection of Smith Road and Old Military Road.

Turning right from that intersection took me back to that long, straight, stretch of Highway 21. Left took me through horse country, past million dollar homes with large barns and arenas where wealthy families board their horses and send their young daughters to learn to ride English style. The road there was straight and wide with manicured fields stretching out on each side, easy and fun to drive twenty over the speed limit on a moonlit night. The intersection where Old Military Road ends at Highway 40 felt like crossing an invisible line into a different world. Highway 40 was damn sure in a different tax bracket. A right turn took me down a long winding stretch of narrow, two lane highway, past trailers with junked cars in the yard, new modular homes, and run down wood frame houses until Highway 40 intersected Highway 21 by the Middle School in Bush.

A left turn and then the first right took me to a gravel track we called Swamp Road. Even if you’ve never been to Southeast Louisiana you can almost picture it in your head. It was a long stretch of gravel road that dropped into dense, swampy, hardwood bottom land before crossing the Bogue Chitto river and intersecting with Louisiana Highway 16. Turning onto Swamp Road was like turning into another world. A world where Loup Garou were real. A world where the devil sometimes strolled as a human in the midnight moonlight, thumbing for a ride, his cloven hoofs the only indication of his evil. There were no lights. No houses. Just hardwood bramble, mud, and moonlight until you reached the black water of the Bouge Chitto. The road was barely maintained, the gravel like a washboard in some places and completely washed out in others. My dad’s light, cheap, two wheel drive S10 pickup fishtailed and bounced down that stretch of road far too fast to be called safe. Swamp Road came to an end where it intersected Highway 16. From there I'd take a right and a few minutes later I would be trying to sneak through the back door to my bedroom without waking my parents.

On clear nights the moon and stars would be bright enough that you almost didn’t need headlights. On the dark nights the stretch of road between Covington and Waldheim was as dark as a tomb. Even oncoming headlights were rare. There may be a couple of lonely vehicles on Highway 21, or a Sheriff’s Deputy parked at the House of Seafood Buffet in Bush, but there was no traffic to speak of. If I chose to take Old Military Road, there was a very real chance I could go from Covington to my bedroom without passing another car. I had the road, the night, seemingly the whole world to myself and there was something magical about that feeling. Solitude is rare for a teenager, control rarer still, but on those late nights tear assing down those rural highways I briefly felt an approximation of both.

Some nights I could let my mind go blank, turn the stereo up and put the hammer down and just drive. Other nights, when I had a passenger, it was time to talk. There is no better bonding for two teenage dirt bags than a long drive down a dark road coming from or heading toward some juvenile chaos and light criminality. Other nights the drive was time to think, to try to come up with a reasonable lie, an excuse, or an alibi. Or it was time to work through tangled, teenage emotions and hormone driven romantic distress.

It was on those long drives that I talked myself into asking out a girl for the first, second, and third times and where I dealt with the crushing defeat of rejection and the low grade, lingering pain of being “just friends.” It was tear assing around the bends on Highway 40 or over the wash board gravel of Swamp Road in the dark that taught me my limits, that showed me I could only push so far before things got scarier than I wanted to handle. Those miles gave me time and distance to process love and lust, fights won and lost, friendships, failures, and fuck ups.

I’d come back to those rural highways after the Army, after I died, in that time when I was technically a man but living in my parents house once again and largely reliant on other people. By then I was paying my own car note, maintenance and insurance and I’d learned what dying was so I didn’t take the curves so fast and I avoided Swamp Road unless I absolutely had to. I’d gotten tired of loud music so AM Radio kept me company. After midnight a crazy, Alex Jones affiliated, preacher from Waxahatchie, Texas paid to broadcast a series of sermons about giants and angels. I had no idea at the time how awful he and his worldview were but I knew he was bat shit crazy and his sermons were fascinating in their weirdness. I can still hear his voice in my head as I type these lines. I can still here the familiar protestant fire and brimstone sermon rhythm as he ranted about mythical creatures. I can still here the odd way he put the emphasis on WAX in Waxahatchie. Even after years away from home, those long dark miles held the same appeal. Even then, calmer, more comfortable in my own skin, I found the solitude comforting.

It was dark but it wasn’t late on the evening in 2002 when a drive down Highway 21 helped change my life. Once again I was traveling from Covington to my parents house, driving alone in the dark when I realized that I didn’t want to go home. I was coming from an Applebees dinner with my brother, his then fiancee, some of their friends and her cute, brunette cousin. It was my second "accidental" encounter with the brunette, our first time speaking, and she was in the front of my mind. Her tan skin. Her dark eyes. Her smile. Our mutual disdain for my brothers antics and her cousin's friends. I’d barely passed Highway 36 when I realized I’d rather keep talking to her than sit at home and watch the ten o’clock news with my mom. But I was still hurt, I was scared, and I wasn’t sure how much I had to offer a pretty young girl so it took me from Claiborne Hill to Waldheim before I got up the courage to turn around.

I turned back on 1083 by that old store in Waldheim and headed Southeast toward Abita Springs. It was another ten miles on dark, narrow highways and winding rural roads to my brother’s then girlfriend’s house where I sat on the couch with that brunette, watched the Russel Crowe movie “Proof of Life” and talked about FARC guerrillas. Within a week I’d drive that same stretch of road home from our first date. Within two I’d drive that same dark stretch of road ecstatic after our first kiss.

For years we drove those long stretches of dark road together, talking, laughing, and arguing, sometimes in jest and sometimes in deadly earnest. We traveled those back roads through St. Tammany and Washington Parish. We paralleled the Mississippi along Airline Highway and River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. We drove Highway 51 through Manchac Swamp. We traveled the full length of I-55. We drove across East and Central Texas. We drove from New Orleans to Boston three times. Twenty-two years later we're a long, long way from the back roads of Southeast Louisiana but me and that pretty brunette are still married. I still like to go on a drive with her, though not so much after dark these days.

There aren’t any long empty roads in Massachusetts, at least not in the Southeast. The roads here never seem to be empty or dark. Morning, noon, or night there’s always someone on the road with you, there’s always traffic. The street lights and house lights are so bright it drowns out the moon and stars. Masshole drivers seem addicted to their high beams, using them even on the Interstate like they’re afraid of the dark. Even without high beams new LED headlights are so bright and my eyes are so old that I’m blinded by oncoming traffic. Driving at night, even responsibly at the speed limit, isn’t fun anymore. It used to be a genuine joy, but now it’s just a chore. Some of that feeling is age, but some of it is zip code.

My mom moved to town after my dad died and there’s no reason for me to drive down Highway 21 anymore. All my family live along I-12 now and my friends live in New Orleans. My mother in law lives in the River Parishes so I still occasionally get an excuse to drive long stretches of back roads but rarely at night and almost never alone. Nowadays I annoy my kid by pointing out the insane distances I used to drive to see their mama. I point out places as we drive along and tell the tale in distances. “See she lived in St John during winter break. I lived in Hammond, but our friends lived in Covington so I’d drive I-55 South to pick her up, then we’d have to come back up North, back to St Tammany Parish…” and my kid’s eyes glaze over because they don’t understand yet. They don’t get what it’s like, being a dirtbag, alone on a dark highway with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and the stereo, driving home after unsuccessfully trying to talk a pretty girl out of her drawers. It bothers me a little knowing that they probably never will. Not like I did. Those kinds of long, lonely, dark miles just don’t exist in Southeast Massachusetts the way they do in Southeast Louisiana, which is a shame. Every dirtbag kid deserves to drive fifteen miles in the dark.

Drive by Trucker's "Zip City" is the single best song ever written about being a teenage dirtbag in the rural south. I never had a muscle car. I never had a girlfriend to try and talk out of her drawers, but I damn sure had a seventeen year old mind that needed to be dealt with.

Play it back to back with "Let There Be Rock" and you get an idea about what those teenage years were like, though I was afraid of LSD, I didn't mess with weed until I was in my 40s, and the sister's name was Katie.