I’m trying pull out of my usual pit stop at Saranac Lake, NY. A tank of Mobil for the Passat, a Subway flat-bread BLT for me. But it’s a busy road, the ten-mile two-laner connecting Saranac Lake to Lake Placid, and I can’t find an opening.
Off to my left a car screeches to a halt on the shoulder. A pea-green Chevy with New Jersey plates. A middle-aged woman emerges and frantically gestures for the traffic on the Adirondack autobahn to stop in both directions.
But it’s not just any woman. Ever see a fertility goddess statuette from prehistoric times? Lots of rolls and bulges and foothills and zeppelins, all flesh and roundness and life? Well, that’s her. With bottle-blonde hair. And she is wearing ballooning sweat pants with some sort of shocking pink top that traces her contours like a geological survey of Appalachia.
Faced with her waggling arms, the traffic stops. Most of the idling vehicles are big pick-up trucks, the sort of stretch black contractors’ trucks with names like Ram or Shove or Rustler and a weakness for large decals of Old Glory and bald eagles. There is a lot of grizzle under the peaked caps, a lot of pinched, hard eyes. Lunch is over, damn it, time to go build something.
The woman is in the center of the road, her back to the lake. She is bent over (or, rather, inclined forward), her arms hanging down, the palms of her hands turned outward, making repetitive shooing motions about six inches from the blacktop. She takes panicked, staccato baby steps, causing Appalachia to quake, but slowly she progresses.
A foot in front of her is a turtle. About six inches long, from stem to stern. It was trying to cross the highway.
A few strains of country waft through the silence from one of the cabs.
At last turtle and goddess reach the far shoulder. She smiles, at no one in particular. Engines are gunned and the traffic rumbles forward.
The motto of Saranac Lake is “An All-American City.”
No comments:
Post a Comment