Timber Ridge - Articles

 

Featured Article This Month

 

The following short story was written by Peter Wood, a Timber Ridge resident. It has been published in the 2010 issue of The Westchester Review, A Literary Journal of Writers from the Hudson to the Sound. It can be purchased on Amazon.com

"Ode to a Road"

by Peter Wood

 

I have fallen in love with a small country road.  Each morning at six forty-five, I hop into my car in Mount Kisco and head south into Armonk.  Sometimes I turn on the radio, but I prefer listening to the poetry of Route 128.  It is four and a half miles of eloquence: whispering evergreens, rumbling outcroppings, a burbling brook. I eavesdrop on the sighing hills, the murmuring meadows, and the singing apricot sky. 

I don’t want to get too sentimental about a country road.  Freud might say, Hey, sometimes a road is just a road. But I know Thoreau would respond, An unexamined life is not worth driving.  So every morning I examine this road. On my drive to school I ask small questions: Was this road once an Indian path? Who built those magnificent rock walls?  How much do these homes cost?

As an adult I have learned to appreciate smaller things: my favorite spoon, a student’s smile, this simple countryside road.   Every morning my wife pours hot tea into my favorite blue cup and toasts me a bagel. Small things.

Small things are big things, I now realize, as I eat breakfast, and they always have been. Try telling that to some of my high school students with their ipods, Ugg boots, and North Face jackets.

In my car every morning I play little games with myself.  It’s a tiny triumph when I guess the correct number of white swans swimming on Wampus Pond, or when I see a muskrat swimming in the water, or spot the same blackbird perched atop his favorite tree. Why does he choose that tree?

I never approach Route 128 without some trepidation. I remember a wild turkey that bolted from his flock and got clipped good.  I clipped him.  The long deep groove from his beak is still carved into my windshield.  Farther south, by a row of golden sugar maples, I once saw an SUV swerve and narrowly miss a deer--but kill another. There’s plenty of road-kill on this road. I remember a buck as he stepped from the snow-covered pines one frozen morning. He leaped over the metal guardrail and slipped onto his back on the icy pavement. Plumes of hot steam shot from his nostrils as he righted himself and nonchalantly trotted back into the woods. My right fender missed his hindquarter by inches. That deer was so much like me at eighteen, so much like some of my nonchalant sophomores—so clueless about death.
   
Last spring, driving toward Armonk, I saw a woman standing in the middle of the road talking to a rock.  Actually, she was sobbing while bending over the rock.  I stopped my car and stepped out. The rock had a head on it, feet and a brown shell.  It was a snapping turtle; its carapace had been cracked clear down the middle, and soft red meat oozed from beneath.   I remembered another rock, forty-five years ago.  My stepbrother was bending over it, holding his golf club.  He was ten and I was eight. His rock had fur and a face and eyes.  It was the bloody head of a kitten.  He stood over it, laughing.

I hopped back into my car and drove to work. Sad memories of my unhappy family still breathe within my heart.  Childhood isn’t always over when it’s over, is it? But driving down this Westchester road each day is a healing. There is power in its beauty and harmony.  This road has always been a fine place to be alone, meditate, and calibrate myself.

On my morning drive, I dream. I’m now in the habit of recalling the good times and letting go the bad, and I find simple spiritual strength in the greens, grays, and browns of the woods. In winter, I notice I am able to peer deeper into the forest and spot things I normally wouldn’t, like a vacant bird nest, wandering brooks, and winding trails. But there are other mornings when fog sets in and there’s a heavy breathing in the morning darkness. Sometimes a moaning. Yes, if I’m not careful, the cold, pale dawn will suck the courage out of me and I will want to drive back home and climb back into bed.

Nevertheless, I have companionship on this road: squirrels, chipmunks, pheasants, turkeys, deer, ducks, muskrats, turtles, and swans. “Animals are different kinds of people than us, and rocks, too,” said Dovie Thompson, a Lakota Indian poet visiting at my school. Someone else recently said, “Surround yourself with people better than you.”  I think that’s what I’m doing on Route 128.

Unfortunately, my tempestuous youth was never as harmonious as the morning pines and sunlit Norwegian spruce lining this road. Trees are nature’s way of painting and on Route 128, color and diversity blend onto a quiet harmonious canvas. Why couldn’t I, at eighteen, have paid closer attention? Are my students equally as blind to this beauty?

In the raucous hallways of my high school, where I teach, and in the dimly lit corridor of my memory, the pulse of the paint is still passion and youth. Mild madness darts about in adolescent confusion, and the hallways’ heartbeat is a chaotic and colorful Basquiat mural. Students, now as then, are well behaved, except with each other. Even in my high school there is plenty of road-kill in the hallways.

This morning, as I drove past Wampus Pond, I spotted that small muskrat swimming in the water. I was reminded of my older brother trapping muskrats in 1960 for their five-dollar pelts. This morning there were mallards on the pond and a flock of wild turkey grazing on the shore. A long pack of cyclists wearing redbluegreenyelloworange Spandex raced toward Mount Kisco.  It’s car traffic. Bike traffic. Animal traffic. Memory traffic. All of us traveling the same road.

Driving home from school this afternoon, I looked out at the woods on Route 128. I drove past evergreens, rock walls, and the pond and I realized I’m still sitting in my classroom—I’m in Room 128--and I’m not the teacher.  I’m the student.  My classroom for all these years has been the road, with the deer, the turtle, the muskrat, and the small blackbird perched atop his favorite tree.  They are my blackboard and chalk. Small things. Beauty. I hope my students are listening.

(Peter Wood teaches English at White Plains High School. His memoirs, Confessions of a Fighter and A Clenched Fist—The Making of a Champion were published by Ringside Books.)
 

Thank you so much, Peter, your story was so beautiful!

 

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

...Robert Frost

 

You are listening to Country Road by James Taylor.