On The Write Path

Bus trip through nowhere

Bus trip through nowhere

I muse... If one bus is late the other will wait.

I converse with a football player in school in the city. He gets off at a stop betweeen nowhere and nowhere, where one person waits to get on and go west.

We roll over the iron rails of abandoned tracks, our tracks bound by white lines on the edges divided in two by yellow down the middle. We are grey-haired, fair-haired, the missing generation in-between is at work somewhere. Mustard blazes in fields under a scrape of white across blue. Sun bursts forth with hawkeye and dandelion. Lupine makes a new home on disturbed soil.

I'm in peace with their wands of purple, pink and blue. White waves of wild carrots bid us on. A glimmer of river, a glance, no time to gaze. The bus presses on through white peaking over pine. We ascend from the advance of Summer to the retreat of Winter. We carry with us the tastes and smells of Spring: orange chocolate on the tongue, a late night dinner's leftovers, gas escaping.

Aurdal. 12:12, an auspicious hour. A roof of scalloped slate. Sons of trolls live here between the ruins of stones. As flowers recede we enter the last strongholds of the Snow Queen. What seep of rock don't we see? What weep of the odorless rot of a child that wasted away centuries ago? Here history lays with the plague, witnesses the famine.

We jiggle along a windy road, my nerves jarred, my jaw opens in a yawn. Birch greens on the scree. A lip of snow snarls at moss. Below we welcome the return to short-lived Spring.

© Kåre Enga 11.june.2015 (edited June 30th)

Note: while taking the bus from Lillehammer to Borlaug.