Rest Stop Rapture—highway motel in a thunderstorm at night—Ambience for reading

Rainy Night/ Highway Motel — spend a mid-90s motel overnight perched above a highway during a thunderstorm.

So after graduating from military boarding school, I faced a nearly thousand-mile drive from deep in the Southeast to the Hudson Valley in New York. I believe we stopped to rest somewhere near Frackville, PA. It was late, and the skies were awash with rain and flashes of lightning. My father was exhausted, and he was almost immediately asleep after tossing the dust cover off the bed.

My heart was racing from the new freedoms I faced. No more reveille, no more taps; no more drill or retired military folks ordering me around. (I was a **** student who had to regularly navigate a retired Command Sergeant Major.) I was free—at least for a few months, before I would attempt another military school (college).

Whatever. That night I was free, old enough to try cigarettes or die in war. Mr. High School Graduate.

The summer felt like a budding verification of me. I had settled something, unshackled myself from societal expectations. I was going to be a big deal (oh, youth and your unobtainable optomism).

All of which is to say: I couldn’t sleep. I was excited. Also extremely bored. The motel room was stuffy. I couldn’t have the volume too high on the manual television—it would wake my father (not that there was anything on anyway). All my Wizard magazines and Mack Bolan novels were packed in the U-Haul box with wheels (the mid-90s being a decade or more before smartphones).

So I read Jonah in the room’s complimentary gold book… about a guy who refuses the Almighty and tries to escape across the Mediterranean. Jonah’s boat is hit with a giant storm, and the other folks on the boat are like, “**** you, dude,” and toss him into the sea. Where he’s eaten by a giant fish. And somehow lives half-a-week in a fish without a tv set.

I remember wishing I had packed Detroit Deathwatch in the car.