Halloween Die-ary #14
October 6, 2020 — I rarely feel more at peace than when I’m behind
the wheel with my loved ones, a screen full of oddity carefully mapped out on
my phone, and miles of roadway ahead of us. Unless those loved ones are
complaining and fighting each other and kicking the back of my seat.
So Lindsey and I edged the odds on our latest day trip and
dropped the two older kids at my in-law’s house and took the toddler, which seemed appropriates since she shares a middle name with the season. We were a three-person family again, like
it was so long ago.
On Saturday, we drove ten hours of New Hampshire and
Vermont, through creepy fog and smatterings of rain, gray skies and bursts of sunshine,
through miles and miles of foliage like thousands of firebombs going off in the
hills.
Normally, when I’m reporting back to you on our Fall road trips,
I focus on the oddity we saw on the way. And we saw some cool stuff—a grave
shaped like a clothespin, a ghost town on a picturesque brook, the possible
final resting place of the man who wrote Nosferatu, the village that Washington
Irving considered the most beautiful place in the U.S. and Europe, and a couple
of atmospheric graveyards. It was a lot of atmospheric graveyards, honestly. And
maybe I’ll get to writing about all those sites at some point for OTIS (quick
plug—I’ve already written about them in the latest OTIS Club Newsletter).
But this time, I’m going to stick with Lindsey’s photos (and one or two selfies from me). She’s
an amazing photographer who should be doing bigger things with her work than
getting it uploaded to places like OTIS, but she really nailed the day. This was what
it was like, traveling through a different world, air as sweet as candy corn and
as crisp as apples, happily anticipating the next turn of dirt road and bright
flash of graveyard pumpkin.
We even eventually achieved foliage-blindness. Too much beauty numbs the eyeballs like those proparacaine drops you get for Lasik, and we get our eyeballs filled to the top. The last two hours of the trip, the home stretch, wasn’t through as magical a world as when we started out, it was just our world. But that was really nice, too. Even after picking up the seat kickers.
