Food for Thought

Quarantine Journal: Part 2
My parents and I live along a country gravel road, over a mile east of Highway 61. Just south of our road, Highway 61 dives down into the Spencer Creek Bottom and then climbs up out of that bottom, hooking southeast on its way to Frankford. From our house, we can gaze out across our pasture-lined hilltop, through gaps in the woods to the valley below; then we can stare out through the hazy distance, across the Spencer Creek Valley, and watch the vehicles on Highway 61 as they climb the hill that leads to Frankford. At that distance, Highway 61 resembles a gray ribbon crawled upon by ants—the ants being cars that seem to blink and flicker as sunlight winks off their glass; those cars seem to move in slow-motion, and some thirty-five years ago, when the world was still large and I was still a kid, I would watch the traffic as it seemed to crawl along the southern horizon on its way past Frankford.
That traffic on Highway 61 has always been a low growl in the distance. Sometimes the growl builds to a dull roar. Sometimes, I hear the scream of tractor-trailer tires on distant pavement.
Yet just after midnight on March 31, I stepped outside my house and heard…practically nothing.
The silence was like a scream. Deafening. Gigantic. Enveloping. It engulfed me as I walked along the driveway, feeling as if I’d just been drowned in black velvet.
In the depths of the coronavirus quarantine, I had stepped out of my house and into a window of time in which apparently NO vehicles were driving on Highway 61, for several miles in either direction. No headlights unraveled like a string of glowing jewels on that hill four miles away; no orange comet’s tail of a transport-truck’s running-lights streaked through gaps in the trees to my west. No jets crisscrossed the sky above me, and for a moment, even the tree-frogs seemed not to be chirping.
For the first time in decades, the relentless scream of human noise in my world had stopped.