The Quiet Rescue Down The Road

The Road Into Clinch Gap

It is a three hour drive from Bethel Springs if you do not stop, longer if the fog is sitting low in the valleys the way it was that morning. The interstate gives out about halfway there and the road narrows into two lanes that climb through country so steep the sun does not clear the ridge line until nine or ten in the morning. Wood smoke hanging low over the hollows. A little white church on nearly every curve, a dozen different denominations all built from the same plan, like the hills only came with one set of blueprints for a church and everybody just picked a different sign to nail out front.

I have made that drive a hundred times to see my son and daughter in law, always with something easy waiting at the other end of it, Sunday dinner or a birthday or just an excuse to sit on somebody’s porch. This time every mile gave me a fresh reason to feel like a fool for driving it, and every mile after that gave me a fresh reason not to believe the last one.

Forty one years of marriage teaches you things about a person that you cannot explain to somebody who has not lived them. I knew, the way you know weather is changing before the radio says so, that something in Clinch Gap had gone sideways, and that my son either did not want me to know what it was or did not think I could handle knowing it. Neither one sat right with me.

By the time I came down off the last ridge and saw the Clinch Gap water tower catching the early light, my hands had gone tight enough on the wheel that I had to stop at the Marathon station on the edge of town just to shake them loose. I bought a coffee I did not drink and a candy bar I did not eat, and I sat in the truck in that parking lot for five minutes doing the thing I had trained young firefighters not to do for thirty years, which is let your imagination get ahead of your information. It did not work. My imagination was already three exits past anything reasonable.