Looking back, I can still picture it, Badger Lake Road, snaking through the rolling hills of The Palouse, parting fields of wheat and fallow ground, veering left then bending right, now rising, now falling, until at one point, at the crest of one last unsuspecting incline, opening onto a stretch as straight and true as the life I should have led.

I knew the landscape well. I took the road to school and back, a high school many miles from home, at first by bus and then by car. There was nothing extraordinary about Badger Lake Road. Nothing. But the long drive left me time to think — I don’t remember what about — and like the road, I’m sure my mind meandered, and over time the distance between here and there was filled with … something, something indeterminate, a certain more-than-nothing that still lingers even now. I suspect it filled with dreams and odds and ends, with present, past, and future, with promises and blunders, fuzzy notions, hard-edged shards, a little fire, a little rain, and vagaries and youthful whimsies. Or, as country folk are wont to say, with this, that, and the other.

It was farm country, and I was a farm boy. Among the ten commandments of my youth: Thou shalt feed the chickens, tend the livestock. At age twelve I sat at the wheel of trucks and pickups and 4-wheeled tractors; at fourteen worked the hay fields, slinging bales into stacks onto flatbeds, only to sling them once again into even larger stacks in barns. I drove our Caterpillar D-6 through the fields, the stubble and the summer fallow, on the flats and hills, under eyebrows of steep gradients where nothing grew but stubborn grass and you had to ride the break of the uphill track as the tractor struggled to stay parallel. Summer brought harvest and sweltering days, in a truck or on the combine. This was an age as yet untouched by high-tech. There were no air-conditioned cabs. Dirt and chaff ruled. When evening came, with dinner done, sleep was always welcome.

Farm life is monotone, large chunks of time largely unbroken by diversions. A passing car occasioned impromptu family meetings, with us gathering at the window, asking “Who could that be?” and watching long after the trail of dust had settled on the gravel road. A blip on the screen: there — blip — gone.

A helicopter might cause a stir. One fellow, a local teacher, had learned to pilot one in the service, and he moonlighted as a crop duster. He took me for a ride once; it marked the high point of my eighth grade year.

Spray planes were more common. You could sometimes see them gliding and dipping, climbing and circling, coming ’round for another pass. The early morning air was best, still smooth as the surface of an inland sea, and echoes of the aircraft’s engine ping-ponged back and forth among the hills. It was not an altogether unpleasant sound, and one familiar to my ears.

That morning on my way to school — in high school now, and driving my own car — perhaps there were echoes in my head, or helicopters, or whatever filled the distance between here and there. As usual, I followed Badger Lake Road as it parted the fields, as it veered left then bent right, as it rose and fell, until I came to that one point, the crest of that one last unsuspecting incline, the one that opened onto a stretch as straight and true as the life I probably expected to lead, as straight and true as the future I likely imagined, as straight and true as a hard-nosed principle or the shaft of an arrow or — if worse came to worst — an unlikely airstrip.

We met at the crest, worse and worst: one ’69 Mustang northbound, one Cessna 150 southbound.

Crest-OH!-SHIT!-AH-prop-SHIT-blades-don’t-DAMN-brake-grip-wheel-UH-hard-right-FUCK-plane-wing-brake-UH-keep-down-brake-now-SHIT-brake-brake-NOW-brake-NOW-stop —

Breathe. Deep breath. Again. Open door. Deep breath. Exit. Stand. Deep breath. “Are you okay? Are you sure you’re okay?” The pilot. “I’m okay.” Deep breath. “I’m okay.”

And I was. My car proved to be a true wing man: The rigging on the underside of the Cessna’s wing had clawed groves across the roof. But soon I took my seat again behind the wheel and continued along Badger Lake Road. On my way to school, I stopped by the police station. “You ran into a what?” Wasn’t it the other way around? I thought.

I still traveled that road many times, and since have traveled many others, but that remains my one and only meeting with a Cessna. Perhaps I’d learned not only to look left and right but also up. But only just perhaps. And now, a lifetime later, looking back I have to ask: Who knows what all might happen on a stretch of road like that?