Domestic Left #69: Drive south

On Friday morning I left my apartment at 6am and white-knuckled my way along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in darkness and driving rain. It was the kind of rain that comes in pulsing waves, which provides a welcome break when it lets up but reminds you over and over again that any relief is temporary, that the rain will in all likelihood return to a punishing intensity around the next bend.

The previous day I had received a text from the organizers of the event I was heading to which read, “Tropical Storm Debbie is now in NC. Heavy rains and flooding are expected today. The UE150 Convention is still ON. We encourage everyone to make special precautions to travel safely in the rain.”

I figured I was in for a nerve-wracking day in the car driving straight into the storm as it moved north. This was not helped by Google Maps popping up a notice every five or ten minutes on my dashboard warning me that my route might be affected by flood warnings.

The fastest route from Pittsburgh to Whitakers, North Carolina is, unsurprisingly, to take interstates the whole way: 76 (the turnpike) to 70 to 270 to 95. But driving interstates through the northern part of Virginia is a flavor of hell that, having experienced it on the drive to the UE150 Convention two years ago, I was particularly keen to avoid. So I had mapped out an alternate route taking U.S. 522 — a road with which I was completely unfamiliar — from Hancock, Maryland to Powhatan, Virginia, then other U.S. and state highways over to meet I-95 south of Richmond. I wasn’t pressed for time, so I figured adding on a couple of hours of drive time was worth it to avoid the wear and tear on my nerves of maniacs driving out onto entrance ramps to pass me on the right and other vehicular risks of driving through greater D.C.

However, as I drove through the rain, I began to envision all of the possible aquatic treacheries of driving a two-lane highway through West Virginia during a tropical storm: plunging down into a rain-engorged valley, giving way beneath a landslide, or simply being blocked by felled trees, with nothing for it but to drive back thirty miles to find another way through the mountains.

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I have complained about the Pennsylvania Turnpike before, but I have to admit it has grown on me the last two times that I have driven it, both of them gray and rainy days. As I left the Laurel Highlands, the rain began to subside, revealing low clouds and fog brushing the hillsides. The kind of weather that evokes Middle Earth, even as you drive past the extractive infrastructure of Middle 20th Century. It’s almost as if the hills of the Great Appalachian Valley are full of dwarves pulling black magic from below the earth, or crushing and grinding sandstone to produce specialty epoxies, resins and polymers.

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I stopped at the South Midway Travel Plaza to use the facilities and purchase some more coffee; as I was waiting for the latter I started watching CNN coverage of the storm on the television screen in the main lobby. From that I learned that the storm was heading north further to the east, to Baltimore and New York City. (In retrospect, all the rain I drove through in Pennsylvania was probably not related to Debby at all.)

With that in mind, I opted for the non-interstate route, which it turned out was probably the correct decision — after I turned off I-70 and headed south, I didn’t encounter any more heavy rains.

I did have to take a couple of thankfully short, easy, and well-marked detours around (I presume) storm-related road closings. And at one point I did indeed have to drive through some high water on a two-lane section of the road in West Virginia. It seemed unwise, but everyone else was getting through okay, even with similarly small cars, so I just powered through with a quick prayer to the automotive gods.

That aside, though, it was a fairly pleasant drive. Parts of 522 are a divided four-lane, other parts just two lanes, and it mostly winds through rolling hills full of wineries and picturesque small farms. It’s Trump country, where the right-wing “biblical conservative” Bob Good recently lost his primary to some (presumably even further right-wing) Trump-endorsed lunatic — Good earned Trump’s enmity by supporting Ron DeSantis — but aside from the political signage, it’s quite beautiful, a sort of Potemkin village of rural America.

Turning off of I-95 into Edgecombe County, North Carolina presents a very different picture of the rural South. Fields of crops stretch out flat on both sides of the two-lane roads, but the haze of heat and humidity gives the green of their leaves a sickly tinge, and the sun hangs menacingly in the sky. There is corn and cotton, peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans, and, of course, the tall tobacco plants with their huge, thick-ribbed leaves.

Edgecombe County is majority Black, with a poverty rate of twenty two percent. Over 90 percent of the farms are owned by whites, and the tobacco is harvested by gangs of immigrants from Latin America, our good neighbors coming north to harvest this spoil of settler colonialism, now turned into an international currency of consumption imperialism.

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Friday night I turned in early, retiring to my room at the Franklinton Center at Bricks right after dinner. To wind down I put on what has been one of my favorite pieces of music recently, Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Messiaen was a devout Catholic with a strong interest in mysticism. His compositions are wild and eclectic, incorporating influences as diverse as Javanese gamelan and birdsong. Quartet for the End of Time was composed and first performed while he was interned in a German prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. It is scored for violin, cello, clarinet and piano, as he happened to be imprisoned with a violinist, a cellist, and a clarinet player. (Messiaen played piano.)

The quartet moves between the eerie and elegiac, the quiet and cacophonous. At times the instruments seem to be playing lines that move completely independently of each other, at times in perfect sympathy.

The fifth movement, “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus,” is a duet for cello and piano; the piano marches through a series of melancholic chords at an “infinitely slow, ecstatic” pace (according to the score) while the cello plays one of the most achingly beautiful melodies I have ever heard. It is precisely the piece of music you can imagine listening to as time itself comes to an end, the last thing you or anyone else will ever hear, and it concludes with the cello playing a single note, the piano repeating a single chord, quieter and quieter, until there is simply no more sound.

In the eighth and final movement, “Praise to the Immortality of Jesus,” the piano duets with the violin; it is similar, but the melody is stranger and the piano trades the even, repetitious rhythm of the fifth movement for something more jagged, each chord played twice in quick succession. Like the fifth movement, it ends by fading into silence.

After the music ended, I lay in bed listening to the cicadas, their rubbing wings making pulsing waves of sound that rose and fell in intensity, a soft lullaby past the end of time.