The Shadow Catcher

Driving east on the 101 toward Pasadena, skirting through the San Fernando Valley, I’m still on former mission land, acres deeded to the Mission San Fernando rancho for growing olives, grapes, corn, wheat and melons. After Glendale, the land rises toward the San Gabriels where the native Tongva, a language clan of the Shoshone, were indentured to the Mission San Gabriel in the eighteenth century, and thereafter called the Gabrieleno tribe. East from here, all the way to Death Valley, the native language was Shoshone, and AZUSA is the first town on the highway to bear a shadow Shoshone name.

The American road is an Indian nation.

FIREBIRD. CHEROKEE. MUSTANG. WINNEBAGO.

Is there any other country in the world that appropriates the names of clans for cars?

If you think you’ve recently been the victim ofIDENTITY THEFT, please press “one,” a voice advises me every time I call my bank, but no one bats an eye at you in your Jeep COMANCHE or your Chevy CHEYENNE.

You can drive clear across the country without being questioned about your Chevy TAHOE or APACHE.

In your TIOGA.

Your CONESTOGA wagon.

I guess I fell in love with being on the road from being in the front seat of the car with my father, late at night, on road trips from Pennsylvania to Virginia.

I don’t think children can identify loneliness in others.

Although lonely, themselves, sometimes, I don’t think children have the depth of experience to recognize loneliness as a state of being that exists in others.

I don’t think we, as adults, are especially aware of loneliness in others, either, unless that person is obviously alone, sitting on a bench, sitting at a remove, picking idly through trash on a street corner, staring from a window.

When loneliness exists inside a family, it havens its own silence. Families breed loneliness that’s disguised as shyness, or as boredom; or as sleep.

Families are designed to be the social antidote to solitude, so to learn to search for signs of loneliness inside a family goes against our instincts.

We’re not taught to look for loneliness, so it passes, like a shadow, over dinners, over evenings watching the TV, between married couples, between parents and their children,

The silence that was probably a kind of dull ache in my father emanated to me on those car rides as a kind of comfort.

He was very good behind the wheel, very capable and uncomplaining, and that communicated to me as a confidence that we were safe, cocooned in a closed environment, he and I up front, mom and J-J in the back, moving through the known and unknown, navigating life together. If there was a social concern over the impulse to manufacture bigger cars and build more roads, those issues were not filtering into the daily news one received as a young girl growing up in 50’s America. To drive was an innocent pursuit. To drive long distances was an adventure. The superhighways — six lanes, eight lanes, the Interstates — were still on drawing boards, so we progressed behind two cones of light down two-or four-lane roads through corn, cotton and tobacco fields, scrubby, cluttered Maryland woods, towns with church steeples and village greens, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Washington and Richmond. The cities were allegro movements in the symphony; the fields and farms andantes. The night had rhythm. The towns approached, you could sense a town’s encroachment through the clearings in the woods, outbuildings would materialize, the town’s corona would glow above it in the sky, the distances between the barns would quicken, houses would construct a chorus line. Whether it was dark or light there was specificity in every shadow. And because it was that specific passage along Route 1 through Maryland and northern Virginia, as we drove south we drove into American history, too. I could name the battlefields in order, north to south. There’s no other country on Earth that has so many battlefields as road side attractions. If you have a mind to do so you can follow Washington as he evaded or pursued the British through the declared independent colonies or you can stop and scan the twilight’s last gleaming over the same harbor waters as Francis Scott Key or follow Lee and Jackson and the Army of the Potomac into boggy marshes over clay pits onto the higher granite ramparts overlooking Richmond.

How my mother’s parents came to settle in a place between the James and Appomattox Rivers in the tidewater delta of Virginia from their separate Aegean islands of Skopelos and Limnos was embedded in conflicting legends, different versions of one family’s history, but their separate acts of reinvention, taken some time between the two world wars, certified the fact that their only daughter Mary was not only Greek, she was a Southerner.