The sky is as big as memory. The light is open like hope. And the mountains surround thought so that all we are is right here, driving home. We are listening to Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette listen to each other and spill blessed unrest into song. My two are in the backseat, looking out their windows at the world we are passing.

 

Up ahead there is smoke, plumes of dust. All too quickly, it mixes with the scene all too quickly. A man is running down the middle of the Santiam Highway, motorcycle helmet on, waving hands, screaming. There is a body in the middle of the street, face down, not moving. There are parts of motorcycle everywhere. We are the second ones on the scene. We pull over. The car in front of us pulls over. I get out, I grab my phone to call 911. I do not have cell phone coverage, we are in the middle of the mountains. I ask the man in front of me if his phone works. No. I ask the car behind me that has pulled over. No. I tell everyone I will drive until my phone works, I will call for help. I jump back into my car. I am shaking. My kids are not speaking, they are staring at the body several feet from our car. It is not a large body, it is not large.

 

I drive as fast as I can. It takes goddamn 30 minutes to find a store, some business with a phone. My phone still does not have coverage. We run in, I tell the woman behind the counter I need to use her phone, there’s been a terrible accident, an ambulance is needed. She does not pause from what she is doing behind the counter. She says, “There’s a pay phone down the road.”

 

“Pay phone?” I say. “Pay phone?” I am not a violent person. I seriously want to jump over the counter and slap her, shake her, get in her face. But there is an image of another face, overlayed, one I couldn’t see clearly, on the asphalt. Plus, there is no time for such smallness. There is never time for such smallness. 

 

We find the pay phone, we call 911. I consider turning around and going back, but know we’d never reach the scene, traffic at this point, backed up for miles and miles. So we continue toward home. I ask the kids how all this makes them feel. 

 

Clarke says, “Today is sad. I feel bad for the guy running.”

 

“Why do you think he was running?“ I ask.

 

“Because he loved the person on the ground,” Clarke says, “And to get away from the badness.”

”Cause there’s nowhere to go,” says Sophie. “We run when we’re sad.”

 

On the drive between the accident and the store I had explained to the kids what was happening, that while this was a horrible situation, all these strangers, people who’d never before met, had pulled over, and everyone was doing what they could to help. That hopefully a doctor would be in one of the cars in the line of waiting cars and do what they could; that the man in front of us was directing traffic; and that our job was to call the ambulance because that was something we could do.  

 

We continue the conversation as the road winds its way out of the mountains. “What do you think about the lady in the store?” I ask.

 

“That lady’s poor,” says Clarke.

 

“Poor in what way?” I ask

 

“Poor in goodness,” he says.

 

“She is missing her heart,” says Sophie.

 

“What I saw today,” continues Clarke, “is that there are different kinds of people in the world. People who stop to help, and people who make us use a pay phone when there’s a phone on the counter.”

 

I continue looking straight ahead but the landscape is blurred through my welled-up eyes. There is no way to anticipate grief, the little whitecaps when one realizes their eight and ten year old see, understand, and accept, the shadows of human nature. It is a lesson that took navigating the open seas of uncharted loss for me to learn, as an adult.  

 

I turn on the music again. The title track of this record, Inside Out, repeats a pattern about halfway through, stacking and re-stacking progressions and rhythms like days on a calendar, like years in a life, so you’re hooked, so your ears begin to trust the song. And then, just when you begin to feel lost in the familiar, it all changes on you. In the liner notes, Jarrett writes, “Inside Out means… bringing pure out from the inside, at the spur of the moment.“ Perhaps kids are inside out adults, and somehow we gradually re-envelope ourselves the older we get, the more what we live through accumulates. Then we spend the rest of our hours, the rest of the song, working to peel it all back again, to get to some sort of simple understanding of who we are and what we want while we can.

 

It’s ten pm, August 1. It is a day on the calendar of our lives. We are home. I’ve just pulled sourdough out of the oven, and rhubarb sauce is cooling on the stove. The kids don’t want to go to bed. So we sit at the table and slather butter to melt into the hunks of bread. I dip mine in the rhubarb. We eat half the damn loaf. Blueberries, too. There are blueberries. I’m still playing the same record, brought in from my car, and now over and over in the kitchen, re-stacking the progressions of my kids words, trying to lock the rhythm of their conversation into my head, their mannerisms, gestures, who they are, trying to see what they see, so I can begin to trust this song, get lost in some kind of familiar, even if for just a little while, even if for just a little while.