Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [21]
For the next thirty miles we watched the light show taking place all around us. While one scrolling sign provided us with the time and temperature, another promised us a hotel room for the special AARP rate of $39.95. The blue lights of a police car on the right shoulder of the eight-lane road lit our faces before the red lights of an ambulance sped by us on the left. Up above, the Golden Arches shone brighter than the signs for Cracker Barrel, Taco Bell, or Burger King, but not as bright as the spotlighted miniature blimp that floated above the Subaru dealership. More scrolling signs over the highway alerted us to road work ahead with increased fines for speeding, while lit billboards on either side offered to meet our needs for everything from personal injury lawyers to spirit-filled churches where we would be welcomed as family.
When the perimeter highway circling Atlanta was first built, it was the boundary between city and countryside. When Ed and I crossed under it in the spring of 1992, we were still well inside the greater metro-Atlanta area, but the psychological barrier remained intact. We might as well have been crossing the Mississippi in the late 1800s for all that we knew about life on the other side. The town we were moving to had two stoplights and no women clergy. The only movie theater in the county was nine miles away. The chicken industry drove the local economy, and the lay leader of the congregation I was going to raised pigs. He was also a Georgia Tech graduate who flew his own plane and drove a Volvo, but even he admitted that Clarkesville was a long way from Atlanta.
This may help explain the wave of nausea that rolled through me as the lights of the city vanished in the rearview mirror. While it was true that I had gotten exactly what I wanted, it was not until the sky turned black that I physically registered how much I was leaving behind: home, family, familiarity, security. When we got where we were going, I would not even be able to find the bathroom light switch in the dark. The cab of that truck was my spaceship, the one safe place I could think of to be, even as it carried me beyond all safety. Would I be able to breathe when I got where I was going, or would I float gasping into outer space before I wrenched free of this vivid dream?
Thirty minutes out of Atlanta, Ed took the exit that led north to Clarkesville. Except for one set of red taillights in the distance, the view through the windshield was entirely dark. The growl of our engine was the only sound we heard. I stretched my arm across the bench seat and put my hand on the worn denim above Ed’s knee.
“Music?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, but when I turned on the radio our favorite station was full of static. I spent the next ten minutes searching for something other than country music and Christian evangelism on the dial, but those were the two main choices. Adding Linda Wertheimer and Noah Adams to my growing list of losses, I made a mental note. Never move anywhere that does not have a public radio station. Then I found a Willie Nelson tape in the glove compartment and put him in charge of easing our transition into the world of his songs.
As Willie crooned about honky-tonk bars and family Bibles, I began to see details in the dark. A thin line of deepest blue separated the treetops from the night sky. Bright specks of light, always paired, shone out of the grasses along the shoulder of the road. The short ones turned out to be mostly cats and the tall ones all deer. As our high beams swept past them, I could see them raise their heads to point their ears at our bright specks of light, also paired.
Every