Essay: From My City Lot

From My City Lot

Longing for the places we never go anymore

By Ed Cullen

My city lot is tiny, but there are places where one may sit to read, look up, and be surprised by the illusion of acreage. Gardeners call it borrowed landscaping.

A neighbor’s trees, a barn, a winding road, a pasture, a pond serve as an extension of our land if we can see them. At a corner of my house, trees obscure nearby houses. My gaze takes in a footworn path, a bench, and in the distance the looming wall of a neighbor’s house. From my chair beneath a mutant Meyer lemon tree, all that my eyes take in belong to my sense of place.

This past year I have longed to be in places I once took for granted; not just longed to be somewhere else, but missed driving to that place, seeing familiar roadside buildings, houses, pastures, little roads glimpsed from interstate bridges.

The exit to Natchitoches off I-49 carries my eye to the college I first approached from another way, up narrow, winding La. 1 from my childhood in Alexandria. The drive from my parents’ house to my dorm at Northwestern State College, later upgraded to a university, took about an hour, but it was a voyage of adventure. Every mile north put home farther behind me. I was fleeing safety, homecooked meals, and familiarity for the uncertainty of a new town, a senseless war, and the specter of the draft board.

My Corsair flyer (it looked like a 1953 Plymouth Belvedere to other people) sped north, cylinders wheezing, air coming into the cab from all directions on the compass, beat up engine gulping twenty-nine-cent-a-gallon gasoline. I came home on a dollar and change and had the temerity to tell the gasoline station attendant to shake the hose (to get every drop of that golden fuel). Up La. 1, the spine of the Pelican State, I was comfortable in the cockpit of my old car. I turned the radio dial looking for my homing beacons, KALB in Alexandria on the way home or KNOC, the radio station on Natchitoches’ Cane River, as I closed on the college. You picked up KNOC at about the city limits where the station’s signal lost oomph and landed in roadside weeds.

The Corsair was a mighty flying ship of the imagination. It had its failings as an automobile built thirteen years after my birth, near the end of World War II. It is funny to think I started life so soon after that great war and my only strong memory of it is the Bluejacket’s Manual my father brought home in his sea bag.

Among the old car’s endearing oddities were the aforementioned radio dial, which somehow was installed backward so that KALB’s 580 kilocycles were at the righthand end of the dial instead of the left, where it was on the kitchen radio at home. The car’s heater didn’t work at all, but the fan made a clicking contact with something metallic inside the heater mounted beneath the dash. The non-heating heater had three speeds and therefore three rates of clicking. An accompanying red light, faded to pink, added to the illusion of warmth.

“I am freezing,” said a date one night at the drive-in picture show.

“Turn on the heater. Please.”

“You know it doesn’t work,” I said.

“Please.”

I turned the knob. The inside of the car sounded like a Geiger Counter on top of the mother lode, and that lying pink light blinked on.

“Happy?”

“Yes.”

This was in the day of bench seats in automobiles. Dates might sit close to the driver as much to ward off frostbite as show affection.

Those drives to school became my first transition from place of childhood to practicing for adulthood. These past months, I have returned to that youthful drive to college and reveled in the promise and newness of the trip. Since the virus, I have made other trips to places where I longed to be, places I was desperate to go simply because I could not go there.

My small city lot sometimes expands to imagined acres of woods on a hillside I know from cycling in West Feliciana. On that hillside, I have built a shotgun house of the mind, a small barn and a garden fenced against deer. The back porch looks down the hill to a pond fringed by pine, oak, and ironwood trees. In the spring, bass and chinquapin, red-ear sunfish the size of small fry skillets, slap the pond’s surface, yelling for me to grab my flyfishing rod and head down the hill at a trot. The good thing about imaginary property is that there is no upkeep, no liability or fire insurance, no fear of intruders and no ad valorem tax payable to the sheriff.

As it happens, in my real back yard in town, there is a shed, open on four sides, with a sloping tin roof. It is as easy as sitting just inside the shed to make the trip to that West Feliciana hillside. It was here where, for years, my small son knew he’d find me when I disappeared on a Saturday afternoon. Happy in each other’s company, we sat on makeshift stools to smell motor oil, dirt, rust, and the burned exhaust of the just-used mower.

The virus that closed our daily lives, made us fearful, restive, and impatient for places we never went anymore but now longed for—is finally easing its grip. This Covid thing reminds us that life has just the one finish line. We are never beyond danger or safe in the knowledge that we are safe. There will always be a virus of some description, a rogue president, a fair-weather Congress, a nation that wants to call itself the best and most powerful but can’t agree on the best way to survive each other.

This virus is a reminder that of all the places we visit, our minds offer the best succor.

I have a garden to make in a place made sunny by storm and tree removal. It won’t take long, so I’ll draw out the work, enjoying the place. There is a bicycle, too, in the shed requiring my attention. So much to do. So much time to do it.