Crossing to Safety Read Online Free PDF Page A

were all trapped, though of course we are no more trapped than most people. And all of us, I suppose, could at least be grateful that our lives have not turned out harmful or destructive. We might even look enviable to the less lucky. I give headroom to a sort of chastened indulgence, for foolish and green and optimistic as I myself was, and lamely as I have limped the last miles of this marathon, I can’t charge myself with real ill will. Nor Sally, nor Sid, nor Charity—any of the foursome. We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
    I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.
    In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—
De Senectute,
on old age;
De Amicitia,
on friendship.
De Senectute,
with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But
De Amicitia
I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

2
    Rain was falling when we reached the Mississippi. Going through Dubuque we bumped along brick streets between shabby, high-porched, steep-gabled houses with brick church spires poking up from among them, and down a long cathedral-aisle of elms toward the river. To my western eyes it was another country, as alien as North Europe.
    The bridge approach lifted us up parallel to the dam. We could see the broad slaty pool above it, mottled with green islands, and the bluffs of the far shore green and shining in the rain. “Welcome to Wisconsin,” I said.
    Sally stirred and gave me a minimal, enduring smile. We had been on the road for three days, at nearly six hundred miles a day, over all kinds of roads including miles of construction in Nebraska, and she was three months pregnant. She probably felt about as cheerful as the afternoon looked, but she tried. She stared down-river to where Iowa and Illinois were linked by a double hyphen of bridges, and ahead to where the road curved out of the river trough toward the rolling Wisconsin farmland. “Ha!” she said. “The
vita
nuova.
About time.”
    “Another couple of hours.”
    “I’m ready.”
    “I’ll bet you are.”
    We coiled along the bluff and up onto the top. The rain fell steadily on the narrow, right-angled road, on white farmhouses and red barns whose roofs announced Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, on browning September cornfields, and pigs knee-deep in muddy pens. It fell steadily as we passed through Platteville, Mineral Point, Dodgeville, and was still falling when somewhere beyond Dodgeville the wiper blade disintegrated and bare metal began to scrape in a crazy arc across the windshield. Rather than delay us by stopping to get it fixed, I drove from Mount Horeb to Madison with my head out the window, my hair soaked, and water running down inside my shirt collar.
    The traffic led us directly into State Street. However Sally felt, I was interested. This that we were entering was our first chance at a life. I knew that the university was at one end of State Street and the State Capitol at the other, and I couldn’t resist driving the length of it once, and partway back, just to get the feel. Then I saw a hotel entrance and a parking place simultaneously, and ducked in. As I was opening the door to start sprinting for the sheltered entrance, Sally said, “Not if it’s too much!”
    Hair soaking, shoulders wet, I made it to the hotel desk. The clerk put both hands flat on the walnut and looked inquiring.
    “How much is a double room?”
    “With bath or without?”
    Momentary hesitation. “With.”
    “Two seventy-five.”
    I had been afraid of that. “How much without?”
    “Two and