161 miles divided by 60 means 2 hours and 41 minutes until they reach Chicago, if they stay a steady 60. Ben has been averaging 72, but this all happened before they missed I-80, when the sunset had still offered reading light.
She tries to concentrate on the essay, but she's absent. She stares at the waist high fences along the highway; a thin line that separates rural and road. With the tufts of husk and trash woven in the wire she practices geomancy, privately. She dances with the white plastic bags that have snagged themselves on the barbs. She turns to Kate and asks what she thinks the fences are for. Kate says, 'Probably to keep coyotes out of the fields.'
It makes her think about when she was little, when her father joked about a mangled coyote lying in the highway margin. "Look, Jones," her father said to her "look at that dog sleeping on the side of the road." She most vividly remembers it's unshut mouth. Second to that she swears she remembers a flick of its tail, a slow inhale. It's unlikely; they wouldve been moving too fast to see those things, but still she keeps them there, in her memory.
She sticks her fingers in her ears and tries to go back to her reading:
"For everyone (besides the errors common to human nature in general) has a cave or den of his own, which retracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or his education and conversation with others; or to the reading of books, and the authority of those whom he esteems and admires; or to the differences of impressions, accordingly as they take place in a mind preoccupied and predisposed or in a mind indifferent and settled; or the like. So that the spirit of man (according as it is meted out to different individuals) is in face a thing variable and full of perturbation, and governed as it were by chance. Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world."
She skips and underlines "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it."
When she looks up again, they are passing a big white truck. She smiles up to a hat and a pair of sunglasses. Her uncle is a trucker and though she doesnt see him very often, she sees the profession in his disposition. He is always roaming, always restless, prone to shutting himself up in his cartesian mental space. He never overstays his welcome: always tired. The trucker returns her gesture, giving a quick smirk before looking back to the road.
In the margin of her book she writes, "Similar to Aquinas- errors of judgment come when the intellect and the will are incongruent. (Intellect, uncorrupted, Will, corrupted)"
The white plastic bags reach toward the farmland. They long to drape themselves over neuronic power lines. They long to lay with one another on fresh earth, to explore this unfamiliar universe that is the rural. She turns to Kate and asks, "do you think maybe they put them up to protect the rabbits from the freeway? "
"The fences?"
She nods.
Kate laughs. "So they can be hit by the tractors?"
She chooses to believe the question isn’t rhetorical, but still, she does not answer it; she just waits for another mile marker. The truth is--and she knows it--she is too superstitious and stubborn. She can't stop believing that coyote really did move.
