Driving in Connecticut

The fall in New England is a storied affair – one well documented and rendered by the best authors and artists. So, it won’t come as a surprise to hear that my favorite places in my senior year of college were these gorgeous western Connecticut byways in late September. My ecology professor had encouraged us to find an off-campus project and I landed on Sunflects in the Western Connecticut Understory. It was something that sounded quite heady and important; but truthfully was just me taking measurements of light that filtered down through the deciduous canopy at various points of the forest before all the leaves had fallen. I don’t even know how I figured out where to go – my dear friend lent me her father’s car and I just drove northwest from campus until I found something that looked like a forest. I would spend more than an hour driving, take a few measurements that seemed like they meant something, and then keep driving. Driving further toward…I don’t know what.

It wasn’t the project that was exciting as much as it was the opportunity to just leave life behind for a while. I could drive fast around these quiet country lanes, kicking up red and yellow leaves and swooshing through the occasional puddle after a rain. These drives were the liberation I needed…my life felt like it was blossoming around me and yet closing in on me all at the same time. So many of my friends were clear and directed in their next steps. Many had lucrative jobs lined up and I had nothing but ideas. Who knew then…but I needed to be free – to be unknown – to have the sense that if I just kept driving I would end up somewhere important.

In some ways I’m still in that car: windows down, music up, feeling like Reese Witherspoon at the end of Cruel Intensions heading somewhere…anywhere but where I had been.