#17: At the Edge of Dreams
"Like some beautiful, illegible writing, the light etched the sky."
(Last time, Charlie made a decision, and Danny got some unexpected news.)
“Nothing lasts,” Ralph declared when we left Marnie’s house early the next morning, “not even hangovers or tiredness.”
So change swept on and carried us in its wake. We drove amid the open miles, passing from Iowa to Minnesota. The cars all around us rolled their thousand ways. We all drove together alone. The lakes and ponds around the Minnesota highway seemed like speckled gardens of sunlight.
Outside Minneapolis, we stopped to get some drinks and snacks, and Pat and Ralph bought another disposable camera.
“We’re definitely going to need some—some evidence of seeing the great man,” Ralph said.
As we walked out of the store, Pat ripped open the packaging and held the camera up to his eye. “So, how will the distinguished poet look as he stands with Mickey Kent?”
“What should I do?” Ralph asked.
Pat waved his hand. “Pick a pose—any pose. It can’t be that hard for you.”
Ralph posed behind a bicycle rack, like he was a tiger about to leap over it. He leaned his head on his hand and gazed into the distance.
Ralph took a picture, too. It was of me, standing in the nearly empty parking lot. I was alone, looking at the road before us. “How evocative,” he said. “You could have been so much… a yearning explorer...someone looking back at the vast waste of a civilization...”
“Come on, Ralph,” Danny called. “We’re not even in North Dakota yet. We’ve got to keep moving.”
Keep moving, keep moving—the theme for that day. Kentstock started tomorrow, and we had hundreds of miles still to go. Now, we could afford not a single a detour or unexpected stop. Now, we had to focus on the goal.
We passed into wide plains of North Dakota. They stretched out like spreading hands. Our road ran like an arrow through the state.
We drove for hours.
“It’s still so sunny,” Ralph said.
“That’s because of how north we are,” Danny replied. “The days are longer here.”
We came to the edge of the state and decided to camp in a prairie of rolling brown-green fields. That night, Pat and Ralph joined in a pick-up game of frisbee with some of the other campers. Danny and I sat and watched them play in the buggy twilight. Pat charged with a roar as he went to grab the frisbee and whooped whenever one of his teammates caught it. Ralph mostly walked at the edges. When the frisbee came near, he would make a wild grab for it—and the whirling disk usually slipped through his frantic fingers.
“Pat’s always so competitive,” Danny said.
“He loves to win,” I said. When we had been kids on the playground, he had tried to make everything a competition, whether it was who could bounce a ball the farthest or who had the longest fingers or who could cross the monkey bars the fastest. Anything for struggle—for victory.
Danny swung his arms out behind him and arched his back. “I’m really glad we did this. I know there have been a few obstacles—and maybe disappointments.”
“Maybe.”
“But we’ve still done something.”
Pat came running back from the game, his chest heaving. “What a night!” He gulped a few breaths. “You know, this night feels like the night before the election, when you carried me to victory, Charlie.”
I laughed. “I was just along for the ride.”
“We were a team, buddy—a team. And we will be again.”
“Not this again—not this again.” For some reason, a grin overwhelmed my face. I laughed again, and it did indeed seem like that night before Pat’s victory that Friday in May.
As the heat pummeled me while I tried to fall asleep, a sudden cry jolted me upright. Then I heard another cry. And another. Then a rumble of claps and cheers.
“Danny,” I muttered.
“I’m awake.” He sat up next to me.
A few more cheers punctured the silence.
“Should we see what it is?”
“Yeah.”
I stepped outside the tent. Other shadowy figures—including Pat and Ralph—stood watching the sky.
“What—” I began and then saw it.
A blue-green luminescence like smoke washed the sky. High above us and seeming to mix with the stars, it rolled and danced and rippled.
“What is that?” Pat asked.
“Aurora borealis,” Danny breathed. Wonder glinted on his words. “The Northern Lights. I didn’t know they came this far south. But here they are. I never thought I’d see this.”
The atmosphere had distilled some wild gift from the sun, and now the green light rolled in the night sky like the wake of a ballerina’s arms. A strand coiled, then straightened, then slipped sideways—infinities of aquamarine horizon. Like some beautiful, illegible writing, the light etched the sky.
“That’s pretty cool,” Pat said.
My chest rode a racing rollercoaster as I followed the sudden peaks and drops of the roving beams.
After a few minutes, the light retreated, but the night sky above still held some trace of its thrill, some memory of the florescent pirouettes. The colors swirled in my dreams.
On MK
—Ralph Cudmore
the bard—in golden tone! the bard in gray toupee! to sing—to sting—to always stay awake old song— the one I knew in antient days! awake—and become new! and make me new let all the chrysalises burst and flashing rainbows fly forth! [In pencil in the margin:] Greve would laugh in my face if I showed him this!
All was ready when we left the campsite that morning. The key turned. The engine of the car had sprung to life, and we were off.
Mickey Kent! A few hours away!
Jagged and raw, the mountains of the West cut into the sky. The far-reaching plains around them gave an even sharper point to their piercing height. And now we were going to reach the sharp summit of joy. Every rotation of the wheels breathed more into the swelling balloon of expectation.
“Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive,” Ralph murmured. A dreamy smile slid upon his face as he hung his hand out the window, his fingers trailing through the flowing air.
“What?” Danny asked.
Ralph looked over. “Oh, Wordsworth.”
“This is going to be awesome!” Pat cried as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Everything glittered like a brand-new toy on Christmas morning—the cast of the sun, that car over there, the funny name of a chain store. Danny had pulled out a print-out of the schedule for Kentstock.
I breathed deep of the anticipation hanging heavy as incense in the car. After everything, there was this. And perhaps, after this, there could be more. We would eventually make it to the edge of Allegria.
Now was the hour for a mixtape that Pat had kept safe in its plastic box: a collection of Mickey Kent’s songs that he had made in our senior year of high school: “The Golden Mix,” as he called it. The smooth voice of Mickey Kent poured out of the speakers.
Young hearts burn with desire; Young blood boils at a look. Young touch sets the skin afire; Young love—a kiss is all it took.
It poured, it poured, it poured—fluttering like streamers out of the speakers, past our burning ears, through the open windows, on the rushing air, past the sign marking the exit that we would turn down on the path to see Mickey Kent.
We met a rock engraved with an invitation in cursive script: Welcome to Allegria. Outstretched like the fingers of eager hands, the golden beams of the sun caused our eyes to squint. Cattle grazed behind fenced-in pastures. The scents of hay and fresh-cut grass spun through the air—and something else, thick and dark and mysterious.
At the end of our long road, in the apogee of noon, it stood: a great white building, carvings running along its top. The edge of shadows—in the lines of the letters, the furrows of the columns, in the shade of the doorway—made the marble even more lustrous, the stones more palpable. The steps ran up to it like a marble waterfall, the water foaming white.
The sound and color of a waterfall projected on a screen can at first be overwhelming. But then the brain begins to take stock—of the flatness and the distortion of the speakers. Then you realize that the waterfall was no heart of nature but an illusion.
Suddenly we noticed that the vista around us was vast and empty.
“Where is everybody?” Pat asked.
“Where are the signs?”
“Where’s the music?”
A few cows stood as solemn witnesses to our arrival—but that was all. No crowds or soundstage or scent of carnival food. No Mickey Kent gushing out of loudspeakers. We had turned the corner into that drive expecting glory and wonder. And, instead, we found nothing.
Well, not quite nothing. I then saw that various bits of refuse littered the grass: pieces of plaster, chunks of stone (no sparkle there!), steel curled like a pig’s tail, tree branches, glass shards, coiled veins of wire, and dust like clumps of gray snow. Like scars, ruts of dirt scored the grass. The fencing at the far edge of the front of the museum reminded me of the barbed-wire barricades guarding trenches in a warzone. Some thick gauze stretched in front of the fencing, blocking my view of what was beyond. Trees like toppled chess pieces lay around us.
“What happened here?” I wondered.
“I don’t know,” Pat said as he parked the car near the front of the museum and next to two pick-up trucks.
“Is Kentstock over?” Ralph asked. “Have we come too late?”
I took a long draw of air, and the heaviness of the inside of a factory, accented with animal excrement, punched up my nose. “It’s like a warzone here.”
“Maybe we can ask at the museum,” Pat said. “See what’s going on.”