Be an Ocean

I spend the first half an hour and 25 miles of my drive to work on wide open country highway.

I’ve timed it. From my house to where I turn onto Salley Road, it’s about two minutes out of town, with a winding cruise past a farm and a couple of abandoned houses falling ever into disrepair. From the point of turning, until I hit the end of Salley Road where I turn onto Wagener Road, it’s 10 minutes — almost to the second. 10 minutes, a few songs, a cigarette, the darkness of dawn that precedes a new day.

When I turn onto Wagener Road, I know that I have 20 minutes (again, to the minute) to get to East Pine Log Road, which I pass to come into downtown Aiken, where Wagener Road becomes Richland Avenue (and I’ll stay straight for the next 25 miles). Wagener Road is 20 minutes of the first pink, tired rays of the sun, the rolling hills and scattered forest, a fork of the Edisto River and a couple of creeks, two sharp turns that I don’t slow down on, even though the traffic signs warn me that I should. But the road itself bids me on ever faster. Not to get to my destination sooner, but just to enjoy the expanse more fondly.

Downtown Aiken is just like any small city’s Downtown — charming, with big shop windows and lots of colors and foliage. That’s probably a mile across, and then I start getting up into highway speeds again, but it’s different. Here is the hustle and bustle of life, the tell-tale signs of civilization: grocery stores in strip malls, billboards, apartment buildings. I’ve entered the world of adult business. But in the previous paradise of backwoods mystique, I’ve expanded my consciousness. I’ve let my mind caress the trees for miles around. I’ve flown at 55 miles an hour with the birds and the deer, and I bring them with me onto the harsher pavement of the businessman’s world.

I feel like an ocean, stretching for miles, canvassing the whole of the countryside with my body, and then trickling like one of those many streams into what is simply a different mode of existence. But my personal style is the same: flowing, babbling, pleasant and cool. An ocean and a stream have works to do; they have canyons to carve out, lands to grind away, ships to sink.

I have a work to do, too.

I switch to “Park” anywhere between 7:25 and 7:40 a.m., which, unless I’ve stopped at the gas station, is exactly an hour from when I left the house. I make my customary loving text to my boyfriend that I’ve made it safely, and I hope he has a nice day.

I enter my office and turn on the lights, feeling nonetheless powerful for my walls.