Cruise Control

It was an afternoon like any other afternoon. The sun was pounding Oklahoma something unmerciful. And, at least in the central area of the state, the wind was to have nothing to do with it. Clint was in his humble abode packing his bookbag with a text concerning intimacy in the Christian marriage and another rather thick book--The Idiot by Dostoevsky. The window-mounted air conditioning unit put forth a cool, guttural harmony like a throat singer of Tuva. Clint set a couple CD's in his computer to burn and proceeded to stuff laundry into a plastic basket. He was heading out west, back home to Elk City for an evening. He needn't pack clothes such a trip--only laundry.

Clint loaded up the Old Grey Mare and headed through Norman to run a few errands before getting on the interstate.

Nicole, all the while, was adrift the north Pacific. Just in and out of sight of the Alaskan coast. Cool, sea breezes would roll across the deck of the Behemoth cruise liner. Nicole would wear her rain jacket and pants to fend against the usual moist. Her location had been determined by rutters and currents for the past six days, putting her in scant communication with her fiancé.

But, some days earlier, she was able to zap an email via a remote site:

...and i find myself an hour later finally saying to myself.... WHAT AM I DOING!!! this is ridiculous because of course i have ended up convincing myself that you and the rest of the world must think the same thing and wondering what you are doing marrying me. i am trying to find the line between not letting myself totally cross over into the self absorbed wallowing dream world and not denying that it is happening. i want to keep every thought captive but so often this just means that i turn to a book or a conversation and ignore it. i am doing much better now (of course there is more to me doing better than just those thoughts.... we can talk about them more later).

i started reading the other marriage book can't think of the name right now. and it helped me to think through some of the things that were on my mind. thank you for helping me through this so much.... i know it is so frustrating but i am so glad that you realize that dealing with it now will lead to so many joys for the future - you will be such a wonderful husband. i love you so much and i miss you a lot (also a sign of these thoughts i think).... i am not wallowing i think i am really learning more and more how to confront these issues. thank you for helping me.

i am missing you.

love,
nicole

Clint was glad to hear of it. He was proud of Nicole's increasing strength in dealing with this issue.

He responded with an email that just informed of his recent mundane doings: work, class, script, and so on.

Somewhere between deposting his paycheck at the bank and driving to friend Kim Perkins' parents' house to drop of a very appreciated vacuum cleaner, Clint realized the air conditioner, even having been granted its typical grace period, was not making the gradual transition into the mode in which it actually produces relatively cool air. He rolled down the two front windows and the back-left window. The back-right window does not work. But, attempted operation of the window does render a rhythmic humming like a throat-singer of Tuva. But, without the cool air, throat-singing--even when emulated by those without throats--did not interest Clint.

Perhaps, he thought, driving fast on the interstate would make the air conditioning work. Basic automobile logic. This hope would hold him until then.

Nicole found a hotel atop the Mountain Ketchikan, and there eventually came another email a day or so:

i was glad to get an e-mail from you but i wished you had said something about everything i told you about my emotional struggles.... it seems like that was the main subject of the last e-mail and you didn't really even mention it. are you mad about it? it seems like you might be. why didn't you send me a longer e-mail? i don't care if it costs money...its not that expensive...
...i had better head back down the mountain. i don't guess i will be able to check my e-mail again today... i don't know... i'm really bummed out and i'm about to cry. i'll probably be able to call you tomorrow night.

i love you,
nicole

Clint wondered at how he managed to let such emotional sentences slide by. Perhaps he succeeded in acknowledging her struggle. Perhaps he even claimed victory at expressing pride towards her thinking through her depressed state. Clearly though, he had missed something.

The air conditioner blasted air that would make space heaters jealous. Clint would later tell his father, in the cool of his parents' home, that he couldn't hold has hand in front of the car console's vent for more than ten seconds before he had to pull his digits away on account of the constant current of very hot air. By the time Clint reached the west side of Oklahoma City, he--with much frustration--shut off the air conditioning. He proceeded to mash the 'stop' button on his CD player, because he could not hear the music through the wall of white noise from the three open windows.

Clint drove by many fields. Some were already hosts to rows of cotton, creating an effect like that of a zoetrope as Clint sped past, except there was no cartoon clown juggling on the other side. Perhaps, he was the spectated clown in his oven on wheels.

Some fields were awaiting the sowing of seeds. There sat a farmer in his air conditioned cab on his tractor, turning the earth. The utter lack of wind and the plowing of such parched soil created a rust-colored, motionless cloud in the wake of the big green machine. It was as though there was an invisible tree and on which a fine red dust had settled.

Some fields still had a crop of wheat that had no hopes of being harvested. It was there to die in whatever way the climate pleased, breaking the crop back into the ground and, thus, enriching the soil for the next crop.

Timestamped a minute or two after Nicole's previous email, in came another:

i shouldn't have sent you that stuff the other day. i knew there was no good way for you to respond to it right now.

sorry,
nicole

Clint was overcome with a feeling of immasculinity. Truly, he felt he had failed. He appreciated the graciousness in Nicole's e-mail, but it made him realize he was allowing something to happen. The hardening of a woman happens in many, many small steps, and Clint felt as though he had made Nicole to accept a gradient of the color yellow to no longer be considered yellow on account of his insistence of playing host to his jaundice.

Tired of sweating on his clothes and his clothes then sweating back on him, Clint decided it was time for drastic measures. He decided it was time to remove not only the standard button-up long-sleeve shirt but the white undershirt all the same. This triggered a thought process.

Earlier that morning, Clint was in the midst of his summer Spanish class. He had avoided completing his foreign language requirement until his last year of full-time college. This did lead to the discovery of the community college experience. Clint would highly recommend it to most of his peers. Granted, the Spanish classes he had taken were quite easy and this is indeed a point of recommendation in his mind, but there is also an interesting sense of community and care. Many would find it derogatory to relate it to a high school class, but there was that sense of community.

Furthermore, there are the characters. Last semester there was a middle-aged man, Tom, who struggled terribly with the basics of the language, and, paradoxically, the most comely of the young women in the class would sit next to him every session. One day toward the end of the semester, Tom brought a stack of pizzas to class.

Upon happily snatching a slice, Clint inquired,"To what do we owe such celebration?"

"I was elected the mayor of Marlow today."

There was the friendly, 30-some-year-old Mormon fellow named Tracy, who knew Spanish quite fluently from his two-year mandatory mission trip to Chilé. Clint sat next to him.

This semester, there was Thomas. He had recently served in Iraq, and he had a baseball cap that made this know by stating "I SURVIVED IRAQ." He had some Hispanic heritage from which he extracted enough knowledge to be the superstar of the class and, well, teacher's pet--mind the previous high school allusion. He talked about motorcycles a lot.

But, this morning, Thomas let loose some impressive information. Apparently, sometime in his younger years, he was quite the daredevil on the interstate. He boasted of fantastical situations in which he would open the passenger door and put his shoed feet on the pavement speeding by. This, he referred to as "skiing." There was also the stunt in which he would stand on the console betwixt the front seats with his torso jutting through the moon roof and steer with his left foot--on the interstate.

He spoke of the configuration of the interior of his automobile that accounted for maximum havoc. The two front seats were reclined as far back as possible. This allowed him to swap seats with his comrade without letting the speedometer drop a mark.

"You gotta have perfect alignment."

Furthermore, the back seats were pulled open to reveal the contents of the trunk. While driving he could then crawl over the seats and retrieve beverages from the trunk--again, on the interstate.

Clint thought it would be far more appropriate that Thomas' hat should rather state "I SURVIVED OWNING A CAR." Clint also thought everyone else should have hats that stated "I SURVIVED DRIVING IN THE SAME REGION AS THOMAS."

Clint felt perfectly reasonable pulling the mild stunt of removing his sticky shirts.

It did help, but he was also rendered that shirtless, white guy driving a near-primer-grey hoopty with all the still-functional windows down. The object of the cotton-row zoetrope was coming to completion.

The Old Grey Mare was soon approaching Weatherford, one of Clint's new favorite stretches of western Oklahoma interstate. Over the past several months, Florida Power & Light [a subsidiary of FPL Group] had constructed seventy-one towering wind turbines that surround the city--a truly fantastic sight. It is almost otherworldly. Where there wasn't wind only sixty miles to the east, the turbines made it clear there was now plenty.

Clint thought about the statement it would make if the whole wind power endeavor fell through and the seventy-one wind turbines were left standing for decades thereafter. It would far surpass any intentional work of Christo. Of all the monuments that exist on account man acheiving the toppest tops, this would be the one that stood as a monument to one of the mistakes of the race. But, it wouldn't necessarily be so sobering as a holocaust museum. A reminder that would be pretty, unique, awe-inspiring, relatively-sobering, and possible of inducing laughter towards human endeavors--past, present, and future. Left to their demise, the turbines would, one by one, collapse over the decades, having provided a certain nourishment for generations.

He wanted to share his thoughts with Nicole.

And that is when the needed synapses finally fired. Clint missed Nicole a lot. She would have held the wheel as he removed his shirt. She would have complained about the heat, and he would have consoled her--forcing him to not complain about it himself. She would have conversely consoled him in regards to the lack of music. They would have yelled at each other, but only to be heard over the wind noise in order to discuss the abstract statements in the wind turbines.

When he reached his destination, Clint shred his sense of outward duty and focused inward long enough to compose not another email letting Nicole know how his day went nor an email that acknowledged forthright his missing her nor an email that merely stated he was proud of her dealing with issues while away. Rather, he composed--as best he could--something poetic, his emotions connected and incarnate spilling out on the monitor aglow in his old, darkened bedroom that had since become the office of his retired father.