The Long Way Home Along the Grand River

There’s a stretch of road that runs along the Grand River on the way back from most of the downtown buildings I service, and it’s not the fast way home, the fast way cuts through two neighborhoods and saves maybe eight minutes on a normal day. I take the river road anyway more often than not, and for a long time I told myself it was because the direct route has worse potholes, which is true but isn’t really why.

The actual reason is that most days by the time I’m heading home I’ve spent six or eight hours in a machine room or a shaft pit with fluorescent lighting and the specific hum of hydraulic equipment, and the river road gives me twenty minutes of actual daylight and moving water before I walk into a house with two kids who want my attention the second the door opens. Not that I don’t want to give it to them, I do, but there’s something about needing a few minutes of buffer between one mode and the other that I didn’t used to admit to myself, like it made me a worse dad for wanting it.

The river looks different every season in a way that snuck up on me once I started actually paying attention instead of just driving past it. Right now with the leaves changing it’s got that particular color the water gets when it’s reflecting a bank full of maples instead of the flat grey of winter or the murky green of August after a dry stretch. There’s a spot where a heron shows up reliably enough that I’ve started half expecting it, standing in the shallows near the old dam remnant like it’s got the same commute I do.

I don’t have a bigger point to make about this one, honestly. It’s not about games or books, it’s just a fact about how I live that I don’t think I’ve mentioned here before, that a chunk of most workdays gets spent on a slightly longer drive on purpose, trading eight minutes of my evening for a stretch of river and some quiet before the door opens. Renae used to ask why I was later than the map said I should be and eventually stopped asking once she figured out the pattern. I think she gets it more than she lets on. She’s got her own version of it, just upstairs instead of on a road.