At Ramsi’s Cafe on the World, where one can order a fusion of Iberian and Thai, Mexican and Turkish, or any number of other surprising blends, we sit at a round table, Steve and Jessica, David and Jeanne, Jenn and I, talking Cub Scouts, expressive therapy, yoga, and Boy’s Night, when our table is filled with paella, Jamaican chicken, calamari, and lentils.
The company is a stew as unlikely and satisfying as the cuisine, but we are too rushed to enjoy it fully. Soon, we’re split into couples, dashing separately downtown along Bardstown Road to the Kentucky Center, where we’ll find ourselves spellbound by Guy Clark, Joe Ely, John Hiatt, and Lyle Lovett.
The hall is packed. The stage is spartan, with only three cocktail tables draped in black, and four simple conference chairs. I begin to feel old, when four men with acoustic guitars take the stage, and I realize that the youngest, Lovett, is nearly 50.
These four storytellers and their guitars entrance the audience. Guy Clark tangles a long yarn, and I’m bound up in it. This comes to me:
It is 1968. A young couple in Rockford, Illinois, married only two years, and out of college only as long, packs their car for a trip west to Colorado. He is a high school teacher fresh on summer break, with curly hair he will lose in a short 15 years or so. They load their infant in the backseat with his favorite blanket, no carseat, no air conditioning.
The little boy’s hair is as white, soft, and curly as sheep’s wool. He bounces and talks without stopping, and will do so clear across America’s Great Plains.
They make their way across the flats of Illinois. The corn is just calf high in early June. How fast it will grow in the dark Midwestern soil.
They pass the Quad Cities and begin the long journey over Iowa’s rolling fields of corn, soy beans, and hog farms to the stockyards of Omaha and Lincoln. In 25 years, this stretch of Interstate 80 will become as familiar to the little boy as each branch of the apple tree in the house in Madison, Wisconsin where he will grow up. And the spot where US-151 crosses I-80 near Amana will seem like one of his life’s key intersections.
Soon they are in central Nebraska, where the corn gives way to sage brush, and the road parallels the Oregon Trail and the Platte River. They make their way to the Panhandle and switch to Mountain Time. The little boy smears food all over the car’s upholstery, and this will become part of family lore that the boy will never escape. He is messy and spits up a lot.
They take Interstate 70 into eastern Colorado. The road begins to rise and fall. Eventually, they’ll pass grazing pronghorns and see mountains not far ahead in the west.
At Fort Morgan, they stop for lunch in a park just north of the highway. There is a small pond, alive with ducks. They turn the boy loose to chase. He runs and laughs, while his mother makes sandwiches. The ducks waddle and take flight, squawking.
Just past the parking lot, on highway 52, which hooks up with 71, continuing to Kimball and Scottsbluff, Nebraska, a black-haired baby girl sits on the front bench seat with her two older parents. Nearing 50, with one child out of college already, they smile at each other, still wondering at their predicament, bemused and delighted by the miracle between them. The baby’s siblings tussle in the back, and the family continues on their way to the nearby farm they still maintain.
It’s kismet of the plains that the white-haired boy and black-haired girl come this close but will not meet for decades, and who knows how many times in how many other ways they have nearly crossed paths, how many coins have passed from one’s piggy bank, to the candy store, to the bank, and into the other’s fingers.
The couple with the white-haired boy, who ran as soon as he walked his first steps not that long ago, cleans up their picnic and packs their car. They head west to Loveland, then up the Big Thompson Canyon to Estes Park, and Rocky Mountain National.
It won’t be long, only thirty years give or take a few, until the white-haired boy travels the same highway through the magnificent gorge and into the mountains where he will be married.
It is 1996. The black-haired girl pours margaritas for the white-haired boy at a bar in Ames, Iowa. They have met for the first time, but it feels as if they are old friends. They are at a crowded table, but he’s scarcely aware of those around him. Only her.
They trade barbs and flash smiles. He has recently filed for divorce, though he’s mending well, and is about to accept a new job in Minneapolis, where he’s always wanted to live. She is choosing between two doctoral programs, one in his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, the other in Lansing, Michigan.
He doesn’t know it, but he is already in love with her.
It is 2006. Her sister is taking them from Scottsbluff to the airport in Denver, a route they have traveled dozens of times. She sits in the back seat with their bouncing twins, now six, still in carseats. At Fort Morgan, they pass the park and turn on to I-70. “I have known that park my whole life,” he thinks to himself and smiles at the familiarity.
He loves this rough land with the distant peaks. It is comfortable, though he has never lived closer than eleven hours drive from it. It is the wide open gateway to the mountains and trees that form the backbone of the continent.
He looks for ducks in the park. He regards the strong and optimistic black-haired woman in the backseat. I think he has always loved her. He always will.