I wonder: where do our memories reside, and why, all of a sudden, do they bubble up from the sea of our subconscious fifty, sixty, even seventy years later?
I was probably eight or nine years old. It was spring break and my mom and dad had loaded up our big blue Buick and we were heading south to Fort Meyers Florida to watch the Pirates play baseball. Spring training is a little boy’s dream: the sun is warm again and you can spend hours and hours watching your favorite players get ready for the season. You can get their autographs. You might even get an old baseball.
But we weren’t there yet. It was a long drive and we were maybe halfway to Florida. My Uncle Paul was with us, sitting with me in the back seat. He was my father’s oldest brother: a small, gaunt, humorless man who snored loudly. I know because I had to share a room with him. I’m not sure exactly where we were: somewhere warm and humid, close to some sort of swamp. It was after dinner and before bedtime. We had stopped for the night at a small roadside motel in the middle of exactly nowhere. It was dark, no lights other than the motel sign, not even along the two-lane road we’d been traveling on. I could smell Florida.
Uncle Paul and I went for a walk before bed. There were no cars on the road; it was pitch-black, but I wasn’t afraid. We weren’t far from the motel and I could hear the spring peepers in the swamp that lay fallow along the road. Soon enough, the road crossed over the swamp—if that’s what it was—and Uncle Paul and I stopped to look and listen. There was some kind of low guardrail and we leaned our elbows on it, looking off into the night. No light anywhere, just the wet, warm, black southern night.
Then I saw it: far off in the distance, between the shapes of the live oaks that loomed in the darkness, I saw a tiny speck of light. It wasn’t bright, it didn’t shine. It was more of a warm orange glow, the kind of light that might come from a candle or a kerosene lantern. I pointed it out to Uncle Paul, but it was so faint, he couldn’t see it. Oh, how I wanted to go there and find its source, but it was too far away and there was no path through the swamp. But the light was mesmerizing. I felt myself pulled to it, but I knew I wouldn’t or couldn’t get there. So I just watched it, wondering who was out there and why.
The next morning, before we set out again, I walked back to the low bridge and looked off through the trees dripping Spanish moss toward where I had seen the light. Nothing. No far-off dwelling, just the loneliness of the swamp stretching away as far as I could see. I think my father might have walked with me and I turned to him and told him what I had seen. I pointed and he peered, but there was nothing to see. We walked back to the motel, loaded the car, and headed south. Where the road crossed the swamp, I took one last look, but there was nothing to see.
All this came flooding back to me a few days ago upon waking. I could still hear the peepers, feel the warm, damp darkness, and see the faint glow pulsing at the end of the long, dark tunnel of tree shapes. And I could still feel its pull, the deep yearning I felt to go there, to see, and to know.
“Even the faintest light shines far in the darkness.”
I’ll be right back.