FALL HAD ALMOST FALLEN

This fall is not like others, just as these last months have been routing around in some otherworldly environment. And so when I decided to drive north last weekend to get a hit of color, to take a photo to go with the following words, I had to finally accept that expectations serve no real purpose. The colors are weak, muted, dehydrated, and what wanness might have been there had been stripped in a recent windstorm. So I began randomly driving back roads, looking for nothing in particular, and suddenly there it was, what I’d wanted all along but hadn’t known it: a farm stand, with real pumpkins, not the perfectly symmetrical artificial vision of life. And they’re Henry’s, the prices marked on duct tape, and look, off to the side, there’s a box to put my money. We need more of these, everywhere; we need to trust that people will do the right thing because they/we all know what that is.

On a clear fall day, driving up 95 is not mere vehicular transportation. It’s mind travel. I am in heaven. Now most people, both those who have known me in only one of my worlds (read “Boston,” “up north,” or “Bangor” here) and those who know me pretty damned well, would think that my definition of heaven would certainly not be Interstate 95. But here I am. And that’s my heaven.

I’m sitting behind the wheel, at peace with the way my car and I meld together as we zone through these seemingly empty miles that mark the northern tip of I-95 between Bangor and the terminus of this 1,907-mile highway that starts in urban Miami and empties out quietly near the Canadian border.

The sky eats up my car and I feel as if nothing separates me from the acres and acres of maple and birch and sometimes needy spruce along the highway edges, from the enormous bruise of a cloud skimming in front of me, from the clusters of Queen Anne’s lace spared each summer by the roadside mowing crews until the plants have reseeded themselves.

If you had ever asked me what I would miss most when I moved off my dirt road and the 40 acres and left the small-town world I had inhabited for 26 years, I never would have thought I would say, “Driving.” And I don’t mean just driving, as in I have plunked my butt on the seat, positioned my hands on the steering wheel, and I am driving from one destination to another.

I mean the kind of open, carefree driving that driving up north is even when you’re headed somewhere. Up-north driving is the kind that gives you enough space in which to float into some other world; enough freedom from traffic and the need for vigilance to plan a life, write a poem, reconfigure the holiday gift- giving list so that no child feels slighted.

When I’m driving along this open stretch of 95, alone, I can think. Really think. I can let one thought trail out and morph into another. And without knowing what I am doing, I am ribboning through images and memories while outside my windows I am surrounded by fire-red maples, brilliant-yellow birches, and that pervasive blaze-orange that shoots like spewed lava up through the bowl of land into the sky.

These fall days if you were to pass this driving fool, you would see a woman alone, but never lonely (there’s a big difference here, folks). I might be bobbing my head, tapping my fingers on the wheel’s rim. I might be singing at the top of my lungs—to some old Etta James, Smokey Robinson, maybe a Macy Gray or Alison Krauss. Preparation before I order up the silence that brings me such pleasure while the world transitions into another season.