Nineteen Miles of County Road 6

County Road 6 runs nineteen miles between where I live and where I worked, and for most of that distance there is nothing but fields and a treeline and the occasional dead barn. I drove it home late almost every night for two years, usually around one in the morning, and I stopped noticing the dark a long time ago. You get comfortable with a road. That is the mistake.

This was a Tuesday in early spring, cold enough that the fog was sitting low in the ditches. About six miles out I saw a porch light off to the right, warm and yellow, the only light for miles. I did not think much of it. Somebody up late. But there are no houses on that side of the road for that whole stretch -- it is state land, has been forever -- and by the time that registered I had already passed it.

Four or five miles on, the light was there again. Same warm yellow, same distance off the road, hanging in the fog like it was floating. My stomach did a slow turn. I told myself there must be two houses I had never noticed, which is a thing you can tell yourself at one in the morning when the alternative is worse.

The third time I was ready for it. I slowed down. I wanted to actually look. And it was not a porch light on a house. It was a light with nothing behind it, just a glow the size of a window hanging maybe eight feet off the ground in the middle of the field, and standing under it, looking back at my car, was the shape of a person. Not walking. Not waving. Just standing in the fog watching me slow down, the way you would watch a car if you had been waiting a long time for one.

I did not stop. Every part of me that had ever heard a story about a lonely road told me not to stop. I put my foot down and I did not look in the mirror until I hit the county line where the streetlights start, and when I did look, the road behind me was black and empty all the way back.

Here is the part I have never been able to explain to myself. When I got home I checked the trip odometer, which I had reset leaving the parking lot out of some habit. It read thirty-one miles. The drive is nineteen. I had not turned off anywhere. There is nowhere to turn off. I sat in my driveway with the engine ticking and did the math four times and it kept saying thirty-one.

I asked around after that. Casually, the way you do when you do not want people to think you are cracked. An older guy who had lived out that way his whole life listened to the porch-light part and did not laugh. He said his father used to call it the waiting light, and that the trick was simple -- you do not slow down, and you never, ever roll the window down, no matter who you think is calling your name from the field.

I found another job closer to home not long after. I tell people it was the commute, which is true, just not the way they think. And on the rare night I still have to take Road 6, I keep the radio up and my eyes on the centerline, and I do not look at the fields, and I have never once seen the trip meter lie to me again. But I check it. Every single time, I check it.