The guy in the red Civic

Today my good friend Jay Czarnecki (who has guest-blogged here before) joins us once again with some rambles of his own about rambling across the Maryland countryside in a red Honda Civic. Leave a comment for him and tell him what you think. Here’s what he has to say…

These days I have an hour-long morning commute to work, but since it runs from one Central Maryland suburb to another, I travel through open farmland for much of the drive. There are places where it is quite scenic, although the sharp boundaries between green pasture and gleaming white housing developments can be jarring. The ascendant real estate market has made it inevitable that most large tracts of land will eventually be sold to developers. I imagine that each successive generation of the land-owning family must make the choice whether to keep and pass on the land or to convert it into an exorbitant amount of cash. The growing number of shiny new single-family homes dotting the landscape like dots on a scatter diagram tell me which outcome has the upper hand over the long term. Sometimes I wonder about the owners of these old homesteads I pass by – often set far back from the road at the end of a long driveway – I wonder if they watch me from behind their windows as I drive to work, just passing through, clearly not of this place. I wonder if they curse me and my fellow passers-through for clogging up their backcountry roads, so clearly not designed to deliver commuters from one part of the state to another. Do they blame me for driving up the cost of living with my high-tech job until they are forced to cash out because they cannot afford the tax assessments? Or instead, do they smile upon me as the benefactor who turned their patch of arable land into a gold mine, freeing them from it. I confess I never thought much about this until I occasionally began to see one of these unseen people, outside, an old woman with a large-brimmed white hat – and of course this sighting changed how I perceived that particular place. Before it was just the farm with the winding driveway that I zipped past each morning, and the idea of associating it with a real live person or persons was a vague notion at best. Just like any other of the landmarks that pace my morning routine – the crooked barn, the brick house unusually close to the road, the mini-mansion with ostentatious pillars marking the entrance – you just don’t focus on the fact that real people live there. It’s not unlike the way you perceive other cars while driving: always the vehicle, never the occupant. It’s the white Chevy that is going too slow, or the green minivan that didn’t use it’s blinker before turning – until you hit one or one hits you, and the driver emerges and you discover that the green minivan is actually a fat man with a New York accent in an ill-fitting suit. Who would’ve thought? I suppose it’s the same for him looking at me and thinking, “This guy is the red Honda Civic?”

So I begin to spot this woman outside on her property, the one that used to be labeled in my mind as the ‘the farm with the winding driveway’, but now is ‘the farm with the old lady with the white hat.’ I see her walking, slowly, down the long gravel driveway (it looks to be a quarter mile long) toward the road, or sometimes heading back toward the house if I’m running late. There is a mailbox at the street, but it is early in the morning, too early for rural mail delivery. And I also begin to see an old man out there as well, and of course I make the logical leap that they are husband and wife. But oddly, they never are walking together: one is always a good twenty or twenty-five feet ahead of the other. So I wonder: why wouldn’t a husband and wife, who have toiled together their whole lives to reap the Earth’s sweet fruits from the soil, why wouldn’t they share their morning constitutional together, side-by-side? Are they estranged? After many sightings, I have a theory. One of them wants to give in to the inevitable and sell the land to a developer who will fill their fields with cul-de-sacs and ftwo-story Colonials while the two of them head south with their windfall to Myrtle Beach or St. Petersburg. The other can’t bear to let go and will never leave. They used to take their morning tour together, but this irresolvable argument has come between them and now they walk separately as if connected by a long unbending pole, keeping them joined forever but at a fixed distance apart. I wonder who is whom – which one wants to cash out and head south, and which one wants to stay and be buried in the family plot out back? I am tempted to stop someday and ask, but I never will. I’ve already been intrusive enough, clogging up their backcountry roads on my way to work. Besides, I know they’d look at me and say, “This guy is the red Honda Civic?”