Decemberists 2
(the Gateway)
I suspect the week was long because of the lingering consequences of the drive. I would directly attribute it to the long tall black coffee I purchased at the Gateway, the rest plaza at the at the top of the long hill the sweeps down- or up- from below the great falls of the Potomac.
I have been passing the Gateway for three decades, since it breaks the freedom of the public pavement with the encapsulated roadway of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Once inside the toll-plaza, you are a hostage of the Commission, and the choice of fuel and food are those of people who meet in boardrooms in the state capital to award franchises.
Howard Johnson had the commission when I was a kid, and riding with my brother and sister in the back of the station wagon. Food was not fast. The alternative was to leave the sanctity of the Turnpike, and Breezewood was a logical place, since the road from there led to Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas.
They tell me the Gateway Inn was one of the first businesses to open after cars and trucks began traveling the Turnpike between Carlisle and Irwin in 1941. It has been in the Synder-Bittner family since then, and is remarkable in having survived in the world of cookie cutter gas plazas. In other hard times, the Gateway held the franchise to fuel military convoys, and the GIs would trade their unit patches for food, gas, or a bunk in the second floor loft.
I did not need that, though I did look at the collection of patches in the glass case in the restaurant. The convoys don’t stop here anymore, and most of the units no longer exist. I traded them a string of digits from my credit card for gas, and a couple bucks for a ham sandwich and a tall cup of black coffee.
The Gateway is perched just past the summit of Sideling Hill, and costs you a full tank of gas to get up there. Coming down again, you could just about coast the 127 miles into DC, and that is just what I did in the big Lincoln that black night of the first of December. When I was safe again, home and in my bed, I tossed and turned. I felt something about to overtake me, in the dead spot of my mirrors.
Strange that a hot beverage should have that affect, though I should remember the consequences of age. On the ship, we drank hot bitter coffee for days at a time, falling into deep Technicolor dream sleep in the blackness of our steel boxes when the shouting and roaring of the jets was done.
It was quiet at Big Pink, and lying on my side I watched the stars wheel through the tall glass windows. I tried counting sheep, though that did not seem to work. And of course, it was not sheep, but women. The saints and the others, women known and unknown, the ones passed on the street, never to be seen again, and the ones that are always right there in my face, never to go away.
All those streets. The voice on the cell phone in the Lincoln called up some of those streets. It was rich and deep, and the vowels and consonants resonated even through the crappy reception in the Tri-cities area. It was a Russian accent, so dense it could be twice-cooked borscht and smoky as Balkan tobacco. It was almost a caricature.
The voice was attached to a woman, that much was apparent, and how a Russian came to be my subcontracting officer was a complete mystery. I have been eavesdropping on them for years, so the accept was both completely familiar and oddly jarring.
It was Anastasia, of course, and the call to me on vacation was about one of my subs who was having a problem with invoicing, and getting paid for honest work honestly performed. I could do nothing about it from the Lincoln. found myself sinking into the world of the Stalinists again, hurtling down the four lane, all for the best of reasons. Anastasia not only had a story about that, but a longer life narrative that goes straight to the Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodiozhi.
The whole mess makes me a situational Decemberist, though I will have to tell you more to make that clear, and Ludmilla comes into the whole thing, too.
I will get it to you tomorrow, Da?
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com