Rustic Overtones
I was standing on the side of the road, gazing up into the cab of the dump truck I’d flagged down. The driver leaned out his window, peeled off his sidewinder shades and smiled. I wasn’t in the market for a load of gravel. I wanted to say goodbye.
My move to the woods a half hour from Portland in 2020 was supposed to be temporary. I’d left my marriage and home there a year prior and had been couch and condo surfing ever since. Not ideal, but better than sleeping with my knees in my ears in my Mini Cooper.
When I arrived, I was not thrilled to be so far from my people — the artists and gadabouts and changemakers who’d defined my life — but we were still in the throes of the pandemic, and my housing options were limited. Besides, I told myself that fall, I’d only be there until spring, when I could look at things with fresh eyes.
Initially, I’d planned to keep to myself, content to stare into the ditch at the asters and empty Fireball nips on my daily walks up and down my road. After all, what could I, an urbane urbanite, possibly have in common with these (OK, maybe I didn’t say the word out loud, but I surely thought it) hicks? But gradually, a nod here and a smile there turned into conversation, then into community, and just like that, four months turned into nearly five years, and I became a junior hayseed-in-waiting.
Denny (not his real name) the trucker was not the first friend I made. That was Mavis (nor hers either), the school bus driver. It started with a wave, which then begat a couple toots of her horn. Even though she was masked, I could tell she was smiling. These morning exchanges were sometimes my sole in-person contact all week.
Denny was also a waver and an even more enthusiastic tooter. There was a lot of back and forth on his dump-truck runs — four or five times per walk. But he never failed to wave. Or toot. In some periods of my life, I might have found this relentlessness tiresome, but not then and there. I always flung my arms in the air and waved back. When I told him I was leaving, he kept on smiling and said, “It was fun while it lasted!” Easiest breakup ever.
The first people I told was my favorite family up the road, whom I’d spent the prior Christmas Eve with and whose boys thought I was a road celebrity. I had a final outing with them; we all piled into their vintage Suburban (replete with tape deck and ’90s cassettes) for the older boy’s Little League game. The mom, the little brother and I sat on a folding camp couch, watching fourth graders bop the ball around, while the dad coached. Another me would have gone bonkers upon discovering I was going to be trapped there for two hours, but I just dug into the mom’s snack bag, propped my feet on the fence and yelled, “Hey, batter batter!”
I had a chance goodbye with my other pair of brothers, who I used to see before the bus picked them up. (Yes, kind of like those no-good husbands with two families, I was working both ends of the road.) As I was walking one morning, I saw a bike-rider racing toward me. This was the brother who’d transformed that year from a sweet little boy into a hockey dude (replete with mullet) and was suddenly too cool to say hello the way he had most mornings since my first year. But lo, here he came, barreling right at me, shouting my name as though my hair was on fire. He skidded to a stop and yelled, “Liz! Liz! We’re going on a vacation!” The tail of his mullet was conspicuously absent.
I was afraid I wasn’t going to see Buster, whose woods I’d walked and who’d once said of the ridiculous Day-Glo wide-brimmed rainhat I was sporting, “Nice bonnet.” He’d been the toughest nut to crack — it took a couple years before I could even get a nod — but we became regular road pals, keeping up with important gossip like roadkill and power outages. When I told him my news, he stroked his beard, looked at the sky and said, “Be careful in the big city.” I’m sure he knew my new town has a population of around 12,000. But I’m also sure he meant it.
Funny how four months can turn into five years in what feels both like several lifetimes and the blink of an eye. Funny how a wave can be the glue that holds your day together. Funny how people I might have once dismissed as not-of-my-ilk proved to provide genuine bonds that so many fancy friends who’ve dropped by the wayside never did. And funny how a way station — no matter the duration — really can become a home. It’s all about the people.
It was fun while it lasted.
Elizabeth Peavey unpacks her life here monthly.
