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Lodging Off Exit 74

We were near Spokane on our way home from the Olympic Peninsula. Nearly two weeks on the road had earned us a night in a motel on the dry foothills east of town. A place designed to make your automobile as comfortable as the guests. A place designed to harvest the traffic from the interstate each night and inject it back into the system each morning as conveniently and efficiently as possible.

The motel had a fountain in a courtyard and large pictures that were scenes from the Bible hung in the hallways. Lit by small accent lights mounted above the frames, they hung on dark red, textured, felt wallpaper. Religious zeal seems to increase proportionately to the vastness of wild and haunted horizons.

My family went to swim in the motel pool. I stayed behind to rest some and watch the first video of the “Lord of the Rings” which had been just released a week before when we were on our way west. From the back of the car, I had heard the movie several times since Yakima. It is rather pleasant to listen to a movie as you drive through the long traveled nights. There was a VCR in the motel room and I took the opportunity to watch the movie I had been listening to for days.

Anyway, as I watched the film a mood crept over me and I found myself overwhelmed with an unexplainable degree of melancholy and welling emotion . . . something was slipping away. Moving away slowly and in its wake it left an emptiness ringing with the echoes of things past, things that would never return. Maybe it was just the end of vacation blues or simple fatigue, but what ever it was, that movie will always hold some of the voltage of that night. I will visit that sentiment when ever I watch it, that melancholy and expansive meaning of things that seem so small but are the very things we dream and then try to remember when we awake and before they slip away. Times pass and we begin to dissipate as we move toward surrender, toward letting go of this world and its concerns.

After the girls were all asleep and I had spent a good while in the shower, I stood by the open window looking out on a small courtyard enclosed by the rooms of the motel. I stood in the dark room and through the open window I could hear the fountain and feel the breeze from the mountains in the east. Some of the windows were still lit around the courtyard and most of them had the curtains drawn closed. One open curtain revealed a family watching the fluttering light of a television. Another with people partying, drinks in hand, standing on small balconies with their cigarettes floating like fireflies.

The curtain was not drawn on one ground level room. When I looked down to the edge of a rumpled bed I saw a woman’s feet and fancy shoes with narrow straps winding suggestively above her ankles. Between them were larger feet in wool socks and sweat pants pulled nearly off. I watched for a long time, probably too long, but then one doesn’t have an opportunity like that very often.

A light went out in a room above and broke the spell bringing back the melancholy from earlier that evening. As it resurfaced I felt very alone and that the world was turning beyond my understanding and dissolving my name like a mist disappearing in the empty foothills.

Surrounded by stacked cubicles of strange and desperate desires, careless and fearful of each other. Separated by walls and ceilings, by curtains and secret motives nurtured and hidden in an affluence that will haunt our children. And behind each window very different dreams were being dreamt, some seemed tortured and twisted beyond healing, some determined to overcome all obstacles no matter what the cost, others hoping for a sanctified redemption and some in trembling silent terror . . .