The thing in the road

Cold for the hour, and the gravel on the county road has gone wet, and the light hasn’t come off the ridge yet, and the creek is the only thing moving down in the cove.

There is a limb across the road about a quarter mile up. An oak limb, the length of a car. It came down in the night, and the rain has been working on the bark ever since.

I got to it a little after seven, and then I stopped.

I want to be straight about those twenty minutes, because the twenty minutes are the reason I’m telling you this.

I did not sit down. I want that on the record. I did not have a rest on a tree at seven in the morning.

I stood in the road and I looked at the limb. I looked at the ditch on the high side, and I looked at the limb again.

Then I thought about stepping over it, which is a thing a person can do. It is not even high.

And then I thought about going around, which is what everybody else in the history of this road has done.

And I stood there in the gravel, working out which one I was allowed to do, as if one of them was not allowed.

Here is the part I did not expect. When I finally got down on one knee to see what was under the limb, there was a box turtle under the limb.

He’d got the whole dry side of the road bed, cool and out of the wind and out of the rain. He was not going anywhere, and he had no plans about the road. The shade had fallen on him, and that was the entire situation.

I am telling you this because I have been walking it all morning and I still could not tell you what those twenty minutes were.

So here’s the question for today.

What is the difference between a path and an obstacle?

I will be honest about the answer before I go anywhere with it. I’ve got about two thirds of it, and the two thirds came off a gravel road this morning with wet boots.

I didn’t go and get a book for this one, and I want that said out loud, because I do it most weeks. There isn’t a book on my shelf about a piece of oak in a road in Missouri.

So this one is mine. If I get it wrong, it’ll be wrong in my own voice, which is the least I can do.

Here is the first thing I noticed, and it took me most of the twenty minutes to notice it. That road doesn’t go straight. It hasn’t gone straight in my whole life.

It wanders round the foot of the ridge, because that is where the ground is flat enough for a wagon. I’ve driven it a hundred times and I did not draw it, and a hundred other people didn’t draw it either. It’s where feet and wheels agreed, over a long time, that a road could go.

And then a piece of oak falls across it, and the road is still the road. It is under there somewhere. The road did not stop being a road because a thing arrived on it.

Here is the part that embarrassed me. In those twenty minutes I wasn’t trying to get past the limb. I had three ways past it before the second one was out of my mouth. Step over. Go round high. Go round low. All three work.

So I wasn’t solving anything at all, I was looking for permission, and there isn’t any out there. Nobody’s standing at the top of that road with a sign.

I was waiting for a piece of oak to tell me which of the three I was allowed to do. It was just a piece of oak, in the shade of the tree it fell out of.

Here is what I think the difference actually is, and I’m still turning it over. A path is something that goes on. An obstacle is something that interrupts.

And those are not the same kind of thing, even though both of them are made out of the ground. One is the answer to where do I walk, and the other is a thing that stops you long enough to ask the question again.

The limb stopped me. That was all it did. It didn’t tell me I was lost. It put a pause in a thing I already knew.

Now the turtle, who is a third thing and not either of those. He was there before the limb came down, and he’ll be there after the limb goes to powder. The whole event that took me twenty minutes did not happen to him at all.

I got down on that knee to look under the limb, and he wasn’t confused by any of it. The shade was on him, and the shade was where the shade was.

I would like to be a turtle for ten minutes in the middle of the day. That isn’t wisdom. I have been in a truck half of this week, and that is the whole reason.

And now the part where it costs something, because everything costs something. If a path is only the thing that goes on, then I don’t get to use those twenty minutes for anything. I don’t get to be a man who was careful.

I made a small ceremony out of a piece of oak. The light came up the whole time. Bo sat on the high side and waited for me to be finished.

I did not enjoy one minute of it. Not one. The whole thing has the feel of standing in a queue for a thing I already had.

That is a hard thing to give up. I’ve built a fair number of mornings on being the person who checks.

And here’s the other side, because I’m not going to pretend it isn’t there. There are real things in roads. A washout with a drop off the end of it. A gate somebody left across the track. A limb on a staircase in the dark, with somebody behind you on the steps who is depending on you.

In those, stopping is the correct thing, and stopping is the whole skill.

So I don’t think the answer is never stop. I think the question is what the stop is for. Today’s was for nothing, and I can tell you exactly what it was for, which was so that I wouldn’t have to be a man who went round a piece of wood without a speech.

Bo had no speech. He went round the high side at a walk, and he looked back once.

I’ve been trying all morning to find the fault in that, and I cannot. Not finding the fault is the finding.

Back on the road, then. The light has come down off the ridge and onto the gravel. The limb has not moved. The road is exactly as wide as it was, going round it.

It will go round it long after that oak is dust under the sycamores. Nothing I did in those twenty minutes changed the shape of that road by one inch. That isn’t a disappointment. I’ve been disappointed by smaller things.

Here’s the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before. Those twenty minutes weren’t about the oak. They were about a speech I gave the oak on my way past it.

Somewhere out there you’ve got a thing sitting in a road this week, and it isn’t a limb. It’s something on a counter, or something in a conversation that keeps getting stepped around and called stuck.

And it isn’t stuck. It’s in a road. You’ve been going round it so long that the going round has become the road.

Here’s the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

On the next walk, once, put down one small thing of yours that you didn’t need. Out of your pocket, on the gravel, at the edge of the path. Nothing of anybody else’s, and small enough that you aren’t sure it counts.

Leave it there. Walk on. Come back in about twenty minutes, look at where you put it, and notice whether you want to pick it up.

You will, and that isn’t the point. The point is that you can watch yourself want to, and go on past.

And while you’re out there, when a thing is in your way, name the three ways past it under your breath. Over, round high, round low, or whatever the three are for that one. Then do the one you were always going to do, and notice how long you stood there first.

Say that number out loud when you get back to the door. The somebody who could hear you is allowed to be a dog.

So that’s the whole assignment. One walk, one small thing left in the road, and one number.

If you skip it, you’ve got ten minutes of a man, a dog and a turtle. The turtle had the better morning, which is at least honest.

The limb is still there. The road goes round. I’m going with the morning.