MY PLAN to drive from
Pinehurst to Newport News and back home to Pinehurst in the same day had gone
well so far. As I approached Raleigh on the way home my thoughts reached back
in my memory to the first time I ever drove to Raleigh, as a teenager.
The year was 1959. I was a junior in high school, and one afternoon I decided to ride up to Raleigh in my yellow 1948 Willys Jeepster to visit the studios of WKIX, if I could find them.
I drove around Raleigh for several hours before
someone gave me a tip that led me down highway 54 where I found the four great
self-standing radio towers that seemed to me to point to Mecca or somewhere
(that turned out to be only Cary). By the time I found the unmarked, unpaved
driveway I had started to get tired, it was nighttime, and the tower lights
that blinked down at me seemed to cradle me in their bosoms, assuring me
that I had found myself a home.
Droplets of rain on my
windshield blotted out the memory and spattered 2005 back into focus. It was
now a little after eight p.m. and I was on the Raleigh beltline
only another hour from Pinehurst when the leaves whipping around
on the side of the road told me I was on the leading edge of
some weather. I guessed I was going past South Saunders Street. It was the last
time I had any inkling where I was.
“Maybe I can drive around
it”, I hoped. Wrong. In less than another minute the monsoon set in,
the road disappeared from view in a solid wall of water, and I was creeping
along the far right lane at around thirty miles per hour while four lanes of
insanity thundered past me in a pointless frenzy to get home to their
television set. I was nearly washed into the roadside abyss by their
wake.
Helplessly I crawled blindly
along. "How can these fools see where they're going?" I mused. For
that matter, I couldn't see either. As if in reply, I saw a lane marker
disappear under the center line of my car. I decided to take the next
exit I could find -- to anywhere -- to get out of harm's way. I didn't want to
die like this.
A road sign appeared in front of me -- DIRECTLY in
front -- and I sloshed the Caddie to a stop, nearly touching the sign. I
sat there for a few minutes catching my breath.
I could make no sense of
either the left or right arrows so I remembered Yogi’s advice: “If you come
to a fork in the road, take it”, and
opted for the right hand turn only to find myself still lost, so I wheeled into
a well-lighted driveway in an office complex and parked under one of their
street lights to try and figure out a map.
The rain was letting up a bit so I rolled down the
window to get a better look at my oasis from the storm. I was parked beside a
large office building with a big lighted "CIGNA"
logo. And in the distance behind it were some familiar radio
towers.
"Sonuvabitch", I
mumbled. “That’s the WPTF array.”
Then it hit me:
My refuge from the storm was
the exact site of the old WKIX parking lot.
I was home again.
The rain had taken me to...
