River Road

It’s an eleven-mile drive along River Road from our house to Avery’s school. The trip takes about thirty minutes, depending on traffic. We often drive the freeway, which shaves a good ten minutes off our time but it’s not as interesting a drive, nor as relaxed. On River Road there’s always a show: we pass a nature center and a public golf course, a woodworking shop named Lothlorien, the mall, the county’s technical college, an old-fashioned roundhouse in the process of being torn down, a popular rib joint, three hipster dive bars, Zen Tubing, an ancient, supposedly haunted, county jail and three convenience stores boasting live bait. There are scores of nearly invisible houses stuck up in the hills, with old cars parked in precarious places, and at least a dozen churches, including the Freedom Biker Church, which occupies a dilapidated storefront next to an empty Aikido studio and across from a plastics plant. There are two river put-ins. A Willow tree’s branches hang over the road in one spot, bangs cut straight. And there’s this stretch of uninhabited road that follows the bend in the river and runs alongside the abandoned railroad tracks. I get lost each time inside that tiny thirty second stretch, dragged out of the city by the river’s pull, mind going off somewhere; then we round the corner and this urban ecotone gives way to buildings and barbed wire and pretty soon the school building comes into view and we’re there.