A Stop in the Night
Pillars of Salt, Post Three
I knew we wouldn’t make it all the way to Wichita Falls overnight. Jessica had been insisting that it would be okay if I needed to stop overnight since before Flagstaff. This meant she was worried about my ability to stay awake all night.
My inclination, an immature one, is to become defiant and prove that I can do it, that I am capable of more than people expect of me. But, Jessica was quick to remind me, stopping wasn’t an indictment of my ability or masculinity, or whatever. She is right, of course, even though I was annoyed about it.
Besides, we had a BBQ planned in our honor by friends and former colleagues, and it would be good to be better rested when we arrived. So, Jessica called ahead to a motel in Tucumcari, where we stopped around three in the morning. Wendell had slept since Flagstaff, waking periodically to murmur sleepily, yawn, and then lapse once more into a serene unconsciousness.
Why do we push ourselves like this? What do we have to prove? To whom do we prove it?
It can only be myself. No one would know if I drove all night or whatever unless I told them. And I would tell them, of course. I would polish my past self up like a precious gem and show it off as an object of accomplishment. This object would stand-in for me, and it would be the image of myself that I alone had placed in the eye of the other.
But it would be foolish. Everyone said as much. They would see, not my polished gem, but a silly man with something to prove. Many warnings were issued, from my mother, my father-in-law, my spouse, all of them sound — pull over if you’re tired. Don’t drive when you’re too tired. Just stop. Which is what I did ultimately, because I was tired and because Jessica was tired and because it was only another six hours to Wichita Falls anyway. Why be in such a hurry to get there?
The truth was, I was anxious to tear the bandaid off.
We had good friends in Wichita Falls. Friends we would be staying with, friends we would finally be able to visit, who would see how our son had grown, whose children we would see had grown too. And, it was where my career had gone to die.
I had arrived, fresh out of my PhD, the ink still drying on my degree, as a Visiting Assistant Professor, visiting from nowhere. I had been explicitly promised that this was an interim position and that the following year a tenure track line would replace the terminal “visiting” professorship. The Dean, the department Chair, my program coordinator had all vowed that this was a growing program and my position was hard-won and secure. Demand for ethics courses alone warranted a full-time faculty member and still does.
With the sole exception of my program coordinator, a man of Jewish heritage who was ultimately run out of town by white supremicists and members of the city council (those two categories not being entirely distinct), everyone had lied and dissembled to my face about these prospects. So for four years, I did huge amounts of unpaid labor, was grossly exploited, developed new classes, recruited a new and larger cohort of students, got graduating seniors into graduate school and internships and their first jobs, rewrote the curriculum, and was then summarily dismissed without warning. Nothing about my dismissal had anything to do with my job performance, which, they assured me again and again, was above and beyond their expectations. I published enough work in my first two years to have qualified for tenure. There were full professors across the college coasting on a single peer-reviewed article and a couple of related conference presentations. The younger faculty coming in made these folks bristle with resentment as we easily eclipsed most of the senior faculty’s accomplishments before we had finished graduate school.
If it weren’t for my friends, I would never have gone back.
I mulled all of this over for the ten-millionth time as we pulled into the motel outside of Tucumcari. Wendell stirred bleary-eyed as I lifted him from the car seat and carried him up the outside stairs to our room.
Bittersweetness is the theme here, I guess. These fucking returns.
We woke up early and were on the road again. On the other side of Amarillo, familiarity started to set in.
Interminable flatness, acres of fenced land, the famous Cadillac Ranch, cows milling about, chewing cud, sows trotting lazily after a few stray calves that can go nowhere very far. Then, the city came into view as we ascended a comically tall overpass that brings you down Interstate 44, cruising high above an abandoned and delapidated downtown still struggling to regentrify itself. A derilect highrise had been forcibly cleared of a squatters encampment just a few years earlier.
All those people await. The ones who helped and those who hurt. Who would I see? Really though, what weighed most on my mind was not which of them I would see, but rather, which of me would be seen by them?