The Sensation of Floating

It was an unfamiliar highway at night and the rain was coming down in buckets.  Red lights slurred in an impressionistic swirl of movement across my windshield and white lights followed suit in my rearview mirror.  

I was a college student who had come home prematurely near the beginning of my  sophomore year in a kind of embarrassed retreat from higher education.  The empty room in my parent’s house was reluctantly re-inhabited and would serve as a melancholy reminder of my faltering steps at securing my future for the next few months.  My older sister was a senior in college having followed the typical progression from high school.  My younger sister was a middle schooler and in the room next to mine.  

Those were listless days and nights trying to figure out what the next step was going to be and I spent at least some of it visiting friends far and afield who had had no such trip-ups.  Two of them were my best friends from high school.  One was studying engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (affectionately referred to as “Rose Poly” by its students)  and the other was at the United State Air Force Academy in Colorado.  And I was at home lying in my bed  staring at the ceiling while leaves fell from trees outside my window.

The rainy night in question was during my trip back home from Terre Haute, IN where I’d spent the weekend with my friend at Rose-Hulman.  A few years previous I’d traveled up for their Home Coming (‘85) when my brother-in-law was a freshman there and we were juniors in high school.  That weekend included the tradition of brash and brainy engineering students erecting a monstrous tower of stacked railroad ties that was set ablaze and required airplanes to re-route in order to not get caught in the heated updrafts.  The entertainment for the evening included Dan Seals who I assumed was a country music singer with his cowboy hat and cowboy boots.  It was not an inaccurate assessment, but then at some point in the concert he picked up a soprano saxophone I had not hitherto seen sitting on the stage and began playing it like I’d never heard it played before, Kenny G notwithstanding.  He was followed by the headliner, comedian Yakov “What a country!” Smirnov, whose schtick was making fun of the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union.  The students ate it up as a kind of exercise in national self-congratulations, but now as an adult I can see more of the veiled critique of American culture that was inherent in his humor.  But those were less stressful times when I seemed to have a clearer trajectory and the pressures of college and pseudo-adulting was still a few years into the future.

So, getting back to “it was raining cats and dogs”, the rain was coming down so hard I started to feel a little uneasy and my windshield was beginning to fog up making it even harder to see in that dark deluge.  I reached for the handle to crack my window to see if it would help with the fogging problem.  As soon as my hand pulled back on the handle there was a kind of strange popping sensation like something had come loose.  The resistance in the steering wheel was suddenly gone.  I looked down at the window handle confused about what had just happened.  When I looked back up the world was slowly starting to move sideways.  I saw the lights in front of me moving from left to right, then the cement highway divider, then the white lights of the cars behind me, then the grassy side of the road, and finally I was looking forward again but sitting off the highway.

The car hiccuped twice, made a rattling noice, and then died.  I sat there gripping the steering wheel panting and feeling light headed.  Cars were flying by, but then I noticed some lights right behind me in my rearview mirror.  Someone tapped on my window which startled me.  I rolled down my window and a man was standing there in the rain.  “Are you alright?” he asked me.  I kind of blinked twice and then said, “Yeah, I think I’m alright.”  He waited to see if my car would start again and when it did he told me to be careful and then ran back to his car.  

I sat there a minute or two letting myself calm down and process what had just happened.  I had been in the far passing lane and traversed all three lanes in a three hundred and sixty degree pirouette with cars in front of me and behind me, eventually coming to rest off the road facing the same way I’d started.  When I eventually worked up the courage to get back on the highway I noticed I was only twenty to thirty feet from an on ramp where cars were flying down and merging with traffic.  

It was like a metaphor for my life at that time.  My trajectory was in a tailspin and I felt like I had lost control of my life narrative while others around me were seemingly locked into a path which was leading them to a fixed point of stability.  My path continued to be a zig-zaggy mess for several more years, but at the same time I don’t believe I’d be where I am today if I hadn’t taken so many risks and forced myself into uncomfortable and sometimes even untenable situations in an effort to find a way forward.  

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