A God With A Dog In The Race

Seeking a Liturgy of the Wild, (Part 32)

It was around dusk when I began to suspect that my lift wasn’t turning up. I’d been dumped on the side of a country road in Vermont with the assurance that a bus would rock up at some point and drive me all the way up to Portland, Maine. Well, I was four hours into the experience and no bus. This was long before it would occur to me to have a phone, and I didn’t own a laptop. I barely knew what wifi was. I’d been working with some graduating kids in a local school – telling stories and weaving ideas – and now I was on my way to a conference. Well, I would be if the bus was going to turn up.

As the light got grainy and the passing drivers were turning their lamps on, I felt serious unease. I squinted without much hope down the road in case there was the comforting sight of a coach lumbering towards me. I wasn’t even at a bus stop sign, I was just told buses stopped there. There was a spit of rain on the wind and the temperature was dropping. It was early spring, and there’d been piles of snow only a few weeks before.

Suddenly a limousine swooped off the road and parked up. Not a speck of mud on it. My own startled reflection looked back at me in the window. That window rolled down and there was the smiling, wrinkled face of the chauffeur.