Spring fever

In 1996, I took the only spring break trip I’d ever take in college. It was our sophomore year, and my longest term roommate and I decided to go on spring break. We didn’t have a lot of cash, so it had to be driving distance, and we were very serious girls, so it had to be contemplative and out of the ordinary. We chose Natural Bridge State Park in Kentucky. It was probably my idea.

We booked a room at the Hemlock Lodge; it was so early in the travel season by state park standards that cabins in the woods weren’t available yet. We weren’t that disappointed--we couldn’t wait to start the trip either way.

My roommate didn’t have a car, and mine was manual transmission, and she couldn’t drive stick. I was in charge of driving by default. It didn’t matter; we weren’t going that far really.

The morning of our trip, I started sniffling. “It’s just my allergies,” I told her. As we got closer and closer to Natural Bridge, the sniffle became a runny nose, and the runny nose became a full-on Christine Wy nasal assault. I drove us through winding two-lane roads with no painted lines and few signs, one hand on the wheel, one hand holding a tissue to my face. The sun shone so brilliantly and trees arched overhead, and I kept feeling worse and worse.

I had to stop for more Kleenexes and some decongestant. “It’s probably just allergies,” I kept telling her. Yeah right. My face was exploding with snot.

We finally found a store tucked into one of the curves of the road at the bottom of yet another terrifyingly steep hill. The store had a cheap wood exterior, I think it’s called wafer board, weathered all around to look gray like all the tree trunks surrounding it. It was decorated to look like someone converted their house into a store, but I don’t think it really was. It had a fake front porch and wagon wheels leaning up against the walls and horseshoes hammered up in rows and old kerosene lanterns hanging from rusty hooks. Hand made signs proclaimed “homemade maple syrup,” but I really never thought of Natural Bridge as maple syrup country. Other signs said “souvenirs” and “gazing spheres.”

“What’s a ‘gazing sphere?’” I asked my roommate, incredulous.

“I dunno.”

I drove into the soft parking lot covered in last year’s leaf litter, and I saw lots of little cement critters and yard decorations all around the outside of the store. Perched perfectly atop special cement holders were chrome-shiny electro pink and blue and yellow globes, reflecting all the trees and cement critters and wagon wheels around. A gazing sphere.

We were mesmerized and repulsed. Here stood the perfect symbol of low-brow Kentucky interests that we prided ourselves in being so far above, but it was the most beautiful and enchanting thing we’d ever seen. We couldn’t help it; the gazing spheres had all the attraction of something forbidden, like a boy you’re not supposed to date, and we couldn’t quit walking toward them.

“What the hell do you think that thing is?”

“I guess it’s for putting in your yard,” she said. “It’s weird. You can see everything upside down.”

We walked around the cement critters as silent and poised as if we were walking through a cemetery reading the oldest monuments we could find.

“Look! That one’s multi-color!”

We saw them all then walked away thinking hauntedly about the gazing spheres, both of us imagining sitting on a front porch looking out into a yard and staring at your own gazing sphere. Paradise?

“Did you like pink best?”

“Kind of,” I said. “The blue was cool too.”

“Yeah, I didn’t like the yellow.” I agreed with her. Something too jaundiced about the yellow.

We found decongestant and Kleenexes, and we joked with the store owner about how we were on vacation and of course I was sick.

We drove to the hotel and checked in. In our room I took the decongestant and washed it down with Killian’s Red, my favorite beer at the time. We laid down for a nap with the curtains open, watching the hemlock covered hills. My roommate made quiet sleeping sounds. I stared out the balcony windows and watched as the sky grew darker and darker, unable to sleep because of the sinus medicine.

The moon began to rise directly in front of me. Huge. It glowed more white than I’ve ever seen before or since, and it looked close enough that I could walk up the hill and just keep walking til I was twenty feet from the moon and maybe reach out and touch it. I wanted to wake my roommate, but I couldn’t speak. I saw every crater and pock-mark and lunar sea, glowing at me with more brilliance than a satellite that doesn’t generate its own light could ever deserve.

The moon at last rose above the hills, diminishing in size, greatness, and beauty. I quit holding my breath. I relaxed my eyes. I let go of trying to keep the moment frozen forever, and I let the moon go. I felt grateful, peaceful, certain I was the only one in Hemlock Lodge to see the most spectacular lunar show ever.

No more than a year later, that roommate and I quit living together, having had a tiff over something we probably should have resolved instead. I sat in the dorm room she had just moved out of and that I was stuck in alone for the rest of the semester, and I read the Wall Street Journal while sitting on the floor smoking cigarettes. There was an article about the humble Kentucky origins of the gazing sphere and its growing popularity. There was no photo to accompany the story, but I remembered instantly the power of watching round globes, vacationing in a hemlock forest.