Rest Stop

I make a point of stopping at the Interstate 35 south-bound Story City, Iowa, rest area each time I return from a trip north.  It is not my favorite rest area.  That distinction belongs to the Enterprise rest area, midway between Austin, Minnesota, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin on east-bound Interstate 90.  The Enterprise rest stop is a forest-nestled collage of architectural styles and accents, and features a deck that juts out over a cliff edge, affording a view some quarter of a mile below of tree-surrounded, meadowed valley so eye-addlingly beautiful that it causes a retinal chorus of hallelujahs.  I once tried to throw a stone into the stream that meanders through that valley and succeeded only in throwing out my shoulder.  Son of Adam that I am, I had overreached and, for several days, anyway, was disarmed for my transgression.

The Story City rest area lacks the Enterprise’s dazzling and dizzying spectacle, but it has its distinctive attractions nonetheless.  Its theme is transportation, particularly, the history of transportation in Iowa and the role of Iowa and Iowans in the transportation industry.  When the state undertook a renovation of the original 1960s-constructed rest area, it included an artist on the redesign team.  That artistic influence is apparent: wheel-shaped windows and benches, highway marker-like pylons depicting various modes of transportation, a terrazzo floor displaying the intersection of I 35 and U.S. Highway 30, and text and image blocks displaying Iowa’s transportation history set into the walls.  A tree-lined concrete walkway provides opportunity for a leg-stretching saunter, and, most significantly, for my purposes anyway, there’s a carved-through-the-woods spur leading to the Skunk River Greenbelt, a ten-mile nature trail.

Before rest areas, there were waysides and roadside parks.  Before waysides and roadside parks, there was wherever travelers spotted a likely place to pull over—usually places that eventually became formalized in waysides and roadside parks.  The best rest areas preserve that historical texture.  And, like all manufactured things, they have a functional use and a cultural symbolism.  Rest stops testify to the midcentury sense of an expansive America, one in which the space of travel lengthened to the point where rest areas were necessary, and one in which the means for leisure travel were becoming commonly available. 

But for me, the best thing about rest stops is the opportunity to stop and rest, to get back into my body, to unkink pianowire-tight back and neck and shoulder muscles, to redirect my attention from the concentrated focus of driving interstate speeds, to give myself away for a bit, for a while, to something looser and more loping, something that relinquishes attention only to find it denser, more crystallized .  During my most recent stop, as I was stretching my hamstrings, a car pulled up next to me, and through its open windows I heard the driver say to his wife and two teenage sons, “Hurry up; we’ve got a ways to go and I want to keep on schedule.”  I could only smile at the irony: a rest stop where no resting and virtually no stopping is permitted.

When I stop at the Story City rest area, I always take the spur to the Skunk River Greenbelt and sometimes venture a half a mile or a mile onto the Greenbelt trail itself.  I build that walk into my schedule.  It’s one of the best things I do.  Something happens to me, in me.  Perhaps it’s simply the contrast with the rush of driving; perhaps it’s the solitude, for I have yet to encounter another person on the spur; perhaps it’s the sheer motion through a setting that shouts aloud its greened summer vitality.  I wish I could see through language more than darkly.  I wish I could find the words to adequately express the subjective experience of my waywarding pilgrimage, words to convey the physical stimulation, the sensual satisfaction, of moving through rhythms of sun and shadow and feeling their alternating warmth and coolness, of hearing burbling bird song and wind soughing leaves, of smelling tree resin and wildflower and faintly, oh so faintly, from somewhere away, a whisper of suntoasted ginger.  Something happens: a cherishing.  I think “pleasure,” is as close as I can come to describing the experience of the experience, of what the quality of the sensations add up to, are like.

Something happens.  Time thickens, congeals with the arrowroot of consciousness, no longer swings me from its sweeping hands.  It’s like an aperture narrowing, like a camera shot irising in.  The subjective edges shrink toward the center.  It’s like a focus, an intense focus, that somehow glances at a widening scope, a broader space.  Pure pleasure, purely contextual and fleeting, a refugee moment, I realize, but, who knows: bead enough of these ephemeral moments together, leaven them with habits of the heart, and maybe doing will become being, maybe the unfinished poetics of pleasure will become a ligature-strong narrative of a good life.

Thoreau says that “time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.”  He does not say what he caught.  Perhaps that’s not important.  Perhaps, sitting and waiting for a nibble, pursuing an inner odyssey, self-baited, he caught himself.