Without warning, the sky opened up and rained violence down on the land. Rain fell in sheets so hard that it seemed like the Box and I were driving in the middle of a raging sea, the water washing over us with such thunderous persistence that I could feel the thumping of the downpour in my chest and the coolness of the air on my skin. The wipers could not keep up with the meteorological madness and just moved water around the windshield in wet Rorschach blots. The chilly rain made the still burning road smoke.

            Then it was over in a flash, like God himself turned off the spigot, and the sun came out from its temporary home behind the lead-colored clouds, getting to work evaporating the water and turning the land from greenhouse to Rainforest.

            All I could think to do was drive, and just gave in to the hypnotic hum of the road on the tires, allowing myself to be taken. A traveler can stop at every single town, try to engage every single person, attempt to derive meaning from the tiniest, most random things, see every new place as a snowy, virgin canvas ready to be slathered with stokes from the mind’s paintbrush. But if the traveler is not inspired, if his mind is not seething with the need to create meaning out of meaninglessness and assign humanness to the faces he sees, then the canvas will remain on the easel, blank. I guess I just didn’t feel like brining out the paintbrushes.

            The roads changed quickly. Highway 83 became US 41, which became state Highway 36 at Barnesville. The Box and I flew through The Rock at full speed, expecting to see some huge boulders stacked on one another, like some monument to quarrying. But the only rocks I saw were the jagged stones that were heaped up alongside the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway. The only living thing I saw in The Rock was a massive turkey vulture that stood over a freshly road-killed possum just west of town, tearing into its belly and removing bright pink entrails like strings of vermicelli, slurping down the flesh in big beak bites.

            Just past Thomaston, on a lonely bend on Highway 36, a totally out of place concrete structure came into view in a clearing in the woods. I pulled over and walked toward it, the walls obscuring what was held inside. When I looked over them, a grave plot came into view, worn and tattered headstones at the head of rectangular concrete slabs surrounded by dead leaves piled into corners and aged gravel, out of which sprung tiny trees, some living, some dead.

            Mom and dad Parsons were buried in a corner of the plot, their headstone watching over the rest of the family, a group that had its share of heartbreak. Annette Parsons was buried in the front of the plot. “Born Aug. 8 1898. Died April 20, 1900.” Next to Annette was a headstone carved in careful calligraphy that read: “INFANT. Son of M.D. & M.L. Lamers. Our son had fainted in the midst of love, his spirit summoned by the angels above.”

The entrance was guarded by a wrought iron gate locked with a rusted padlock thick with cobwebs, looking like it had not been opened in years, maybe even decades, even though there was space enough for the remains of several more souls. Maybe the families, when they got the plot, thought they’d need more space to ensure that their future generations would have a place to rest. But with their children dying, those generations never came to be, the gravel level and bare, a collection place for dead organic matter that blew in off the fields or fell from the trees above it.

I sat on a mound of dirt next to the plot, captivated by the gray stillness of it. It was a blueprint, I thought, a design of sorts to hold the end results of the hopes and dreams of its forbearers. Wishes that never came to be, seedlings planted with the hopes of growing into thick, strong trees that would drop their own seeds, but had been plucked out of the ground by the heartbreaking hand of fate. The wind hissed through the trees above the plot, and leaves like flower pedals fell, landing softly in the vacant part of it, twisting on their descent.

As I looked both ways before crossing the highway, a white cross caught my eye, not 30 feet from the plot. It was a memorial to Amanda, aged 19 years, who died at this spot. Plastic flowers, faded by sun and rain, had been pushed into the earth to give the memorial some life, but it was obscured by the concrete monolith, which seemed to grow larger as the minutes ticked by.

I left, the feeing of foreboding on me, trying to shake it off with the humid wind that blew through the Box.