Great Openings IV

The fourth in an occasional series. Previous installments here, here, and here.

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren't turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollment at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I'd been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her "friend"—Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.

That morning, before all the news started hitting the fan, Eddie Short Leaf, who worked a bottomland section of the Missouri River and plowed snow off campus sidewalks, told me if the deep cold didn't break soon the trees would freeze straight through and explode. Indeed.

That night, as I lay wondering whether I would get sleep or explosion, I got the idea instead. A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.

— William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways, 1983.

I read this book many years ago, on a whim, I think because I liked the title. The author had been an English professor at the University of Missouri when his life started to fall apart around him; his subsequent travels and this book were the result. I've always catalogged it mentally alongside Steinbeck's Travels With Charley and, to a lesser extent, Kerouac's On The Road, even though the fine details have faded from my memory over the years. But the opening lingers.

It occurs to me that I would do well to keep this advice in mind–especially here in Sweden, where you get a fair number of such thoughts simply because the night is so damn long in the wintertime. It's hard to muster up much wanderlust, or restlessness, when everything around you is snowy and dark. But it is easy to feel very disconnected: you tend to take for granted the ability to understand what's going on around you, and when you suddenly realize that you can't comprehend the signs on the subway, the headlines in the morning papers, or the conversations going on all around you–can't understand anything at all, really–it weighs on you.

Ironically, during my job search, the notion of taking the biggest leap I could find was one of the reasons I chose to move to Sweden in the first place. But there are some days now when being here feels distinctly claustrophobic, probably because my interaction with the outside world is essentially shut off due to the language barrier. If I don't get out of here at least every so often, I'll probably go slowly insane.