Time Travel

In an episode of “The Twilight Zone” a car is driving through the dark and somehow passes into the past.  I always feel that way when we’re driving to the beach, especially when we leave late in the day, like we did yesterday.

 We hustle to leave home and get on the road — to “beat” the traffic.  (If you live in Atlanta or any other big city, you know what a joke that idea is!  Traffic is always snarled.) 

Within minutes of pulling out of the driveway, we’re in stop-and-go, 8-lane highway traffic.  The radio’s on, the day’s events fill the car with sound.  My teenage daughter’s cellphone rings “Singing in the Rain” — her chosen ringtone — with her friends checking to see if she’s free for the evening.

After about an hour, maybe two if traffic’s heavy, the highway calms down.  From 8 lanes to 6, from 6 lanes to 4.  Grass gone to seed waves from the shoulder.  Barbeque restaurant signs flash by.  We open the thermos of coffee, continue listening to news on the radio, crunch on pretzels.

Nearing the Georgia-Alabama border, exits grow sparse.

Beyond Montgomery, the landscape starts to look like my childhood memories.  Fields float by.  Now and then a farmhouse beckons with warm, yellow-lit windows.  An old gas station, a barn, a fruit stand used to be here.  They’re only kudzu-covered bumps in the dark now.  Stars grow numerous overhead.

The darkness deepens as we turn onto 2-lane roads south of Troy, Alabama.  My teens fall asleep as we drive.  Outside the car there are no streetlights, few houses, cats on porches.  Sometimes a concrete-block church breaks the darkness, its white paint  glowing as the moon rises.

Finally we reach the Florida line, and the road turns south.  We delve further back in time.  Forests of spindly pines line the road nearly all the last hour.  Wispy fog-ghosts hover over the rain-damp streets. 

It could be 2007 or it could be 1967.  Everything looks the same.  I start to remember the beach when I was a kid — miles of white sand backed with dunes instead of condos.  Pulling blue crab and huge flounder out of the Inlet. 

Icy-cold Cokes made with real sugar instead of corn syrup.  Doughnuts for breakfast (and no one worrying about the fat or sugar!) 

Spending the mornings and late afternoons sprawled on an air raft in the Gulf.  Waiting out the mid-day heat curled up with a book in a palm tree’s shade. 

Someone else buying the groceries, cooking the meals, and doing the driving.

Sigh.

And then it’s back to 2007.  We reach the beach.  A narrow ribbon of about 3 blocks lines the Gulf with house upon house upon hotel upon restaurant upon strip center.  Lights, action, and thousands of cars with Atlanta tags. 

Oh well.  At least I can float on the Gulf’s gentle waves, close my eyes, and pretend.