Picking up hitchhikers

Since summer has finally decided to turn its ignorant cheek and fold its glorious, sun-shimmering self over Wisconsin, one of my friends and I decided to take a drive through the back roads of our little section of the state. With the windows rolled down, the radio turned up - regrettably like a lot of friends, we disagree on styles of music, but we found a way to compromise - and all the haphazard arrays of trash that lives on the floorboards of her car blowing around our feet, we sought out tantalizingly winding country roads that whispered promises of things to come.

This friend I haven't known too long, maybe a little more than a year, maybe a little less, it's hard to remember sometimes. But when we first met I found her intriguing. She had a certain flair that guaranteed her a sticking spot in your mind as if her memory were like a fresh fly strip set out in a cow barn every hour, so the maximum amount of flies would stick to it at any one time. Not a very glamorous simile, I know, but there it is. From that first moment of meeting her I knew I wanted to get to know her better, so I set about calling her, delving into her world while I shared bits of my own, eventually the two were intermingling.

But on this certain day we were to meet, something different would happen. While the wind played a rough but joyous song through our hair, the radio's voice at once choked and carried thinly on that same wind, the car groaning and bouncing around and underneath us atop the ill-kept country roads...there was a single person trudging towards that same road. Perhaps she could hear the laughter, hear the car crunching over the sharp-toothed potholes of the asphalt. Or perhaps she just felt like taking a gamble today, for no reason in particular. It was perhaps the kind of feeling one gets when passively watching TV and abruptly craving caffeine, of any form, and even while you find your legs restless with the thought your mind is weighed down by the knowledge that it's nearly nine o'clock at night, but some part of you, perhaps greater and more persuasive than your brain, is ignorant to this fact, and so you shuffle into your kitchen, wondering who or what is controlling your limbs and before your mind can scramble forward, reaching for those reins that were whisked from its hands so violently...

The car is slowing down, the single person now stands at the crumbling shoulder, bony arm extended like a dilapidated, abandoned lighthouse still attempting to beckon, even though the once roiling sea beyond is as dry as its splintering brick throat. The radio is turned down, the wind ceases its full-throated song and instead retreats quickly from the interior of the vehicle, leaving the myriad piles of trash to dance aimlessly then flutter somewhat embarrassed to the floorboards, perhaps somewhat haltingly. The single person swivels their head, hair of an indiscriminate color, the same goes for the eyes which hide behind uniform black squares, which would come to be significant in the future when it came to her, only in a metaphorical sense.

My friend turns the radio down even further, leaning over me to gaze out of my window at the person still standing on the shoulder of the road. Her arm slowly drops to her side, the thumb relaxing to rest amongst the other fingers. I feel my own gaze searching those black squares, feeling like a person trying to a read a book of braille with no fingers, or fingers with no sight. My friend, still leaning over me, opens her mouth, her face so close to mine I can smell the strong mint flavor of her bubblegum, and I'm assuming she's about to pose the question "do you need a ride?" when those black squares swivel, catching a thick band of dying evening light - which causes me to glance at the sun standing still and brooding behind a windbreak of trees separating two undulating gold fields.

But it isn't just the black squares that move, its also the sandal-clad feet, and the spindly arms. She crosses the front of the vehicle, the only noise the scraping of her cheap flip-flops on the crumbling concrete...and then the driver's side door opens, my friend raises her hands and arms, but the fingers aren't splayed, and her head isn't down. In fact, glimpsing the corner of her mouth before she is tugged lightly from the seat, I catch a smile, faint but there, as if she had been, what? anticipating this? Could it be?

No time for questions, I tell myself, as the black squares reflect me fully and then turn towards the dirt-streaked windshield. The key turns in the ignition, the gearshift taken in one hand, and then the same mantra continues, only the road before us dissolves away like chess pieces on a picnic table on a windy day. Leaning forward I notice its still a narrow country road unfurling like a crimped and faded ribbon, and there are still rolling fields flanking each side of the road, but somehow it feels different. And I know it isn't only due to the fact that someone new has taken the wheel, her gaze riveted to the windshield and the expanding countryside beyond.

As I settle in my seat, this new meandering road trip in the country a mystery to me, I can't help but wonder where it will take me, and why my previous road trip was severed so abruptly. I had thought things were going smoothly, and - dare I speak it? - could even sense a vague but somewhat solid ending to it all, something that I had found myself within reach of before, but only been disappointed in the end. Would this time be different, I thought?

"We're here." I start at the gravely voice coming from the driver's seat. Glancing quickly at the black squares I find my attention brought again to the windshield. Only this time it isn't a fraying, crimped ribbon before us but the red, crumbling dirt of the Oklahoma plains. Undulating fields of the Midwest have been seemingly violently ironed out until they simply stretch all around us in great, baldy patches of summer-parched grass and deep gouges where I assume tornadoes have churned their flinty teeth.

A low groan sounds to my left. She is getting out of the car. Fingering the release on my seat belt I step outside as well, looking down at the oddity of my pale skin against such a foreign color of soil. Footsteps crunch ahead, she is making her way towards a pair of tall, round silos leaning into the dying evening light, one sporting a rusting, hole-ridden metal cap while the other has only a shell of one, crude steel bars forming a skeleton atop its sturdy lip. Perusing her in a odd half-gait of a walk and jog I let my eyes roam the area around me, noticing nothing more significant than insipid Oklahoma plains and the two silos. Where were we, I wondered?

"My name is Chassyl," she yells to me and I feel my neck crack as I glance sharply upwards. She is sitting on the lip of the leaning silo, her feet now free of the flip flops. With a halo of burning evening sun around her I now notice her hair is perhaps a dark red, or is it a dark brunette? Still impossible to tell, but somehow with more questions piling on top of one another like the basket of dirty towels in the basement no one wants to wash, despite the dwindling supply of clean towels in the closet upstairs, she was become more defined to me, certain features manifesting themselves when I wasn't looking, or wasn't thinking about their absence too much.

"Sorry I had to boot your other friend out of the car," the gravel bed is cleared from her throat. "But I just felt like you needed to get to know me a little bit before you went back to her. I felt myself fading, standing there for those three or four days, waiting for you to finally turn down that road. You know, you should really get that 'no vacancy' sign fixed at that ramshackle motel in your head, that place was so crowded I couldn't believe it! And some of those people have been there since your middle school days! I had quite the conversations with them, and I guess now I can see why they don't mind staying so long, it really is a nice place, even if the motel decor and the building itself reminds me of some small-town, eighties trucker stop."

"What did you say your name was?" I rub my neck, which is by now sore from tilting my head up to look at her. She swings her feet against the silo, the halo of sun retreating now, casting her in uniform shadow again.

"Chassyl," she says, adding a laugh. "But you'll need to know more than that. Come up here and look at this. You'll get a better view from up here, believe me," she adds when I spin around, searching for the place of interest her finger points to. I cock an eyebrow, glancing up the length of the silo. She throws her head back and laughs. I step onto the third rung from the bottom.

"You remind me of my best friend Augie, her real name is Augustine, but no one but her father calls her that, because he can never remember she doesn't like to be called anything but Augie. You'll get to know her too, she's great. She's afraid of heights just like you. Funny how she ended up being best friends with me, right?"

"I guess so," I mumble, looking down as I pulled myself up two more rungs. Just then a ripple of deep-throated thunder cascades through me, making my hands ache as the vibrations travel through the metal ladder rungs.

"You love Oklahoma right?" I glance up at her, realizing I'm swaying slightly and pull myself closer to the rungs. "Then you're going to watch to hurry up and watch another beauty of a thunderstorm roll in. You only get the slow-movers like these in the summer, and they're fun to watch that's for sure."

And that was how I ended up on the very top of an abandoned silo, sitting next to someone I knew only as Chassyl but somehow already knowing we would be friends, even if it was only temporarily, but like all the others crowded into that outdated, seventies-embracing motel in my mind, she would find an empty room and sit patiently, knowing she was stored away safely, and not forgotten.

All right, just in case I need to clarify, none of that actually happened. Well okay, some of it did, but only in my head. And what I mean by that is. I was plodding along, working on a novella where the main character is Lorraine Lansing - the girl at the beginning of the blog post - but then suddenly Chassyl appears on the shoulder, pulling Lorraine gently aside and she takes me to two leaning silos in the middle of red-dirt Oklahoma with a summer thunderstorm drunk on humidity is rolling in and she's sitting on - of all things! - a silo. I used the above metaphorical story to portray the humorous way my mind has of focusing on one story, then interrupting itself to start another - or as I put it in the story, picking up a hitchhiker.

Because in all truth, Chassyl is a hitchhiker, it's just that she's a fictional one! I mean, when you think about, I know nothing about her besides her name and the fact that she's female, yet last night I sat down to write four pages of one random moment in her life and found that I was extremely satisfied with that. Also ironically, while I was at work jacketing books today I thought of a snippet of Chassyl's best friend's past, which would be her best friend Augustine - oh, excuse me, Augie - so I got up and snagged the little notebook I keep in my purse to write it down. But still, you can't expect to get the whole picture with only a few jigsaw puzzles right? But wait, there's more! I also have a vague idea of Chassyl's home life, and she also owns a black gelding named Clandy - which is short for Clandestine, yes I know, not only do I give my characters absurd names, horses apparently don't escape the habit either!

And you might be wondering, what's the whole bit about the 'hotel in your head'? Well, the way I see it is this. Since I'm never able to turn any one character away and whatever haphazard storyline they come with shoved into some dilapidated, outdated and beat-up suitcase they happened to find, I started thinking of my mind as a shabby motel for all of them, and the 'no vacancy' sign never turns on no matter how hard I try. Albeit when I really think about...would I ever want it to turn on? After all, then I risk the chance of passing by intriguing characters like Chassyl, or even Lorraine Lansing! Who is, honestly, one of my favorite characters I've ever created. I mean, how often do you meet someone who doesn't like to wear pants right?

In closing, I can only hope I encounter many more interesting characters within the span of my literary lifetime, and even dare to dream of revisiting some of them in possible novella series or just for the pleasure of rereading things I've writte in the past, perhaps smiling inwardly at the memory of the first day I picked up a hitchiker...and knew it could only get better from there.