Around the Fire // A series on ritual, transition, and belonging

The Drive Home

It is dark by the time we are off the water now.

Not dusk. Dark. Headlamps to break the rods down, hands gone clumsy, the pullout suddenly a small lit circle with a lot of night around it. Six weeks ago we were loading up in the last of the orange. Now we are loading up by feel.

Then the drive.

I turned the heat on for the first time last week. It came on with that smell a heater has the first time you use it, dust burning off somewhere behind the dash. Nobody said anything about it. Everybody noticed.

The windows have been down since May. They are up now.

There is a particular quiet to the ride back in September. In July it is loud, because everyone is still running on the day. In September the same drive is the heater fan and not much else. One kid asleep against the window before we reach the main road. The other one awake, looking at nothing, not asking for the radio. Wet boots in the back throwing off that smell of river and wet rubber I would not trade for anything.

I know this road better in the dark than I do in daylight. The turn where the guardrail is bent. The house that is never lit. The stretch where the deer stand at the edge and you slow down without deciding to. Headlights, then the trees closing over, then the long downhill, then town.

Nobody does the recap on the way home this time of year. In June you talk the whole way back, every fish, every miss, who should have done what. Now it is enough that we went. The day is already what it is going to be, and saying it out loud would only make it smaller.

Then the driveway. The island lamps still on in the kitchen because somebody left them. Gear stays in the truck until morning, which I have said I would stop doing and have not. Boots on the step. Somebody's fleece on the floor by the door for the next three days.

That is the part I would keep if I had to choose. Not the fish. The drive back with the heat on and the kids quiet and the river still in the truck with us, everyone tired in the specific way that only comes from a day outside in cold air.

It only gets darker from here. In a month we will be driving home at five. By December we will not be going at all and I will be at the bench instead, tying for water I cannot picture yet.

But it is still September. There is an hour of river after work if you want it, and a dark drive back, and a heater that smells like October.

We are going again Sunday.

~ John