Unexpected Destinations: Old Highway 81
Pitch black; a white dirt road. My headlights slid through the darkness. I could feel the weight of the Golden Boy shifting as its tires slid back and forth ever so slightly over the gravel — terraplaning, you might call it.
It was about 9 o’clock. I was tired and not at all sure that the evening had actually happened. Was this for real? Was this legit? Am I really going to try to rescue a baby from his crazy father in Tennessee?
That’s where the day had gone. From a struggle to free myself from my modal sheets, to writing a lengthy fluff feature on two first-year schoolteachers, finally to a little white prefab house with green trim. Inside I talked to a young woman who claimed that the baby’s mentally unstable father had, practically if not legally, kidnapped their son. He is allegedly living in squalor. The baby has already been in the hospital once. The authorities in Tennessee will do nothing about it.
I interviewed the woman and her mother at the dining room table, right by the large front window on the house. It looks out on a field, where a few horses grazed lazily. The table was big and solid, polished and well kept. Bumpy pillows cushioned wooden chairs. The mother served me iced tea and then mint-M&M ice cream.
The house belongs to the parents, the father, short and a little dwarfy, wears a small studded earring and is pleasant to talk to; the mother is a tallish woman whose face is oddly shaped — it looks like she may have been badly burned at some point in the remote past. The daughter is even taller, with big hips and strawberry blonde hair. Her other child, a three-year-old daughter with bright eyes, was busy being unable to sit still.
Both the mother and the daughter were possessed of a calm, tired sadness, although not without their humor. They laughed at the incredulity of their story, but you could tell they felt defeated by the system, although they weren’t even sure which system it was.
After a while, we moved into the living room to talk on the speaker phone to the daughter’s mother-in-law. I rocked gently in a big poofy recliner, my recorder on end table by the phone. The long room had thick green carpet, a couple couches on the back wall, green blinds, low white walls, a fireplace.
Their story, I’m sad to say, sounds legitimate. There’s really no way I can avoid looking into all this and trying everything I can to get the baby someplace safe. We’ll see if it checks out when I start making calls tomorrow. They had a lot of documentation that backs up everything they’ve said.
I feel like I could really accomplish something worthwhile here, but for now I’m just exhausted and a little skeptical and hopefully not too cynical. I guess it’s all part of the job.
Pitch black; a white dirt road. My headlights slid through the darkness. I could feel the weight of the Golden Boy shifting as its tires slid back and forth ever so slightly over the gravel — terraplaning, you might call it.
It was about 9 o’clock. I was tired and not at all sure that the evening had actually happened. Was this for real? Was this legit? Am I really going to try to rescue a baby from his crazy father in Tennessee?
That’s where the day had gone. From a struggle to free myself from my modal sheets, to writing a lengthy fluff feature on two first-year schoolteachers, finally to a little white prefab house with green trim. Inside I talked to a young woman who claimed that the baby’s mentally unstable father had, practically if not legally, kidnapped their son. He is allegedly living in squalor. The baby has already been in the hospital once. The authorities in Tennessee will do nothing about it.
I interviewed the woman and her mother at the dining room table, right by the large front window on the house. It looks out on a field, where a few horses grazed lazily. The table was big and solid, polished and well kept. Bumpy pillows cushioned wooden chairs. The mother served me iced tea and then mint-M&M ice cream.
The house belongs to the parents, the father, short and a little dwarfy, wears a small studded earring and is pleasant to talk to; the mother is a tallish woman whose face is oddly shaped — it looks like she may have been badly burned at some point in the remote past. The daughter is even taller, with big hips and strawberry blonde hair. Her other child, a three-year-old daughter with bright eyes, was busy being unable to sit still.
Both the mother and the daughter were possessed of a calm, tired sadness, although not without their humor. They laughed at the incredulity of their story, but you could tell they felt defeated by the system, although they weren’t even sure which system it was.
After a while, we moved into the living room to talk on the speaker phone to the daughter’s mother-in-law. I rocked gently in a big poofy recliner, my recorder on end table by the phone. The long room had thick green carpet, a couple couches on the back wall, green blinds, low white walls, a fireplace.
Their story, I’m sad to say, sounds legitimate. There’s really no way I can avoid looking into all this and trying everything I can to get the baby someplace safe. We’ll see if it checks out when I start making calls tomorrow. They had a lot of documentation that backs up everything they’ve said.
I feel like I could really accomplish something worthwhile here, but for now I’m just exhausted and a little skeptical and hopefully not too cynical. I guess it’s all part of the job.
posted by Matt at 8:34 PM
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