Highwaywoman
Driving up the Garden State Parkway this afternoon I was tailgated through Metropark and Iselin by a minivan with a line drawing of a white wheelchair on a blue placard swinging from its rearview mirror. One of the old stone bridges we passed under was festooned with American flags blown like scarves against chain link fencing, and a black poster that read:
Support the troops
Win the War!
I saw no punctuation after ‘troops,’ so it wasn’t clear whether a causal relationship was implied (that supporting the troops will result in the war being won) or a reflexive definition (that winning the war is support for the troops). Either reading, I suspect, would be approved of by whoever decorated the bridge. Nowhere else along my three hundred mile route was there any other visual evidence of the war(s), or commentary for or against them.
The poster was presumably responding to the slogan Support the Troops—Bring Them Home, which in turn replies to the commandment to Support the Troops that has been distributed on yellow ribbons since at least the Gulf War. The yellow ribbon has a fascinating, at least 400 year history in paintings, music and movies, as a symbol of a woman steadfastly waiting for her love to return. In December 1979 Penelope Laingen, whose husband was the most senior foreign service officer being held hostage in Iran, tied a yellow ribbon around a tree in her front yard. “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree” had been a top hit in 1973 and resurged in popularity.
A true folk symbol—from life to art to life again, each previous use bestowing authority until the current use supplants it in popular awareness.
Long before LieberCare, I tried to avoid driving in Connecticut whenever possible. A pass-through state with its own densely populated areas, Connecticut’s hilly interstates (I’m looking at you, I-84) are particularly harrowing slaloms: left-hand exits, disappearing right-hand lanes, and a combination of low speed limits and infrequent enforcement that means, on any given stretch, there will drivers maintaining anywhere from fifty to eighty-five miles an hour (the surprisingly entertaining I-84 guide at AARoads traces the route’s vagaries).
Today, nearing Hartford, I saw a truck ahead of me with two tall smokestacks—ocean-going funnels almost—black, twice as thick in diameter and half again as high as those of normal trucks, above a massive, low-slung, hot-rodded magenta sleeper cab. Sun-shielded windows—the works.
You don’t forget a sight like that. It was the same cab I’d seen headed north on the New York State Thruway the summer before last when I was on my way to Bread Loaf. Both I and the women I was giving rides to had been slightly freaked out; on the back of the cab, in tattoo-style letters small enough so we had to crane to see them, we read “Vengeance.” Both times now, the cab was in the right-hand lane, driving very slowly. I’m pretty certain its driver was a woman.
This time I was not freaked out. I like thinking of the Northeast as small enough for us to have passed twice, and of the interstates being traveled by a trucker Flying Dutchwoman in her magenta cab, always en route, slowly.
