James Merrill
D:RIVER
A single lesson converted me. I heard the call and would
obey it happily ever after. This was in the summer of 1919. My
father, back from France, gave me thirty minutes of instruction, after
which I was on my own, learning by experience over a network of
frail dirt roads flung outward from our village into the surrounding
farms. I should be able to describe those roads, those farms. People
we knew lived on them. Without question I must have stopped to
talk, enjoy a piece of cake or, the following year, a cigarette, to
stroke the long face of a stalled animal before, my own face brighten–
ing, I leapt back into the sputtering Ford. But I have no such mem–
ories. That summer of being fifteen, conjured up today, might have
passed exclusively within the moving car. My teeth would clack
together over ruts. Off to my right a discoloration of the windshield
made for the constant rising of a greenish cloud. I inhaled a warm
drug compounded of fuel and field. My feet, bare or sneakered,
burned, grew brown, grew calloused. One day at summer's end I
noticed in the rear-view mirror a tiny claw of white wrinkles at the
corner of each eye.
In those days to my embarrassment, as later to my pride, I was
not mechanically minded. Other boys my age preferred the langu–
orous exploration of parts to the act itself. I took as much interest
in what lay beneath the hood as I did in visualizing my entrails;
that
is
to say, none.
Quite simply, I adored to drive. Enlarged to the dimensions of
