I Have So Many Miles To Go

The old gray Volkswagen Beetle rattled softly like a patient old horse that had long ago accepted its job.

Father Lance Lake rested his elbow on the open window and let the cool Maine air roll through the car. Pine trees stretched along the road in tall ranks, like silent monks keeping vigil over the highway. The parish rectory had disappeared behind him an hour ago, but he still felt it in the rearview mirror.

Ten years.

Ten years at St. Brendan’s Parish in Bar Harbor. Ten years of baptisms and funerals, parish festivals and late-night confessions. Ten years of blessing houses, counseling marriages, and—on the rare, terrible nights—facing things that lurked where faith and darkness met.

Ten years.

The bishop’s letter still sat folded in the pocket of his cassock.

Reassignment.

St. Michael the Archangel Parish.

San Gabriel Valley, California.

California.

The Beetle hummed down the highway.

Father Lance adjusted his glasses and took a sip of coffee from a battered thermos. It tasted terrible, but it was warm, and that counted for something.

“Well,” he murmured to the car, “westward we go.”

The Beetle did not object.

By the time he crossed into New Hampshire, the sky had turned a pale autumn gray.

Father Lance had always liked driving. There was something monastic about it—hours of quiet, the rhythm of the road, the slow unfolding of landscape.

Priests, he thought, lived a strange life.

A man could spend a decade rooted in one place, watching babies grow into altar servers and altar servers grow into college students… and then one envelope from the bishop meant everything changed.

He wondered how the parishioners would manage.

Old Mrs. Callahan would miss him. She pretended to be cranky, but she cried every time he anointed someone in the hospital.

And the MacLeod boys—God help whoever inherited them as altar servers.

He smiled.

The Beetle trundled onward.

Massachusetts blurred by in long ribbons of highway.

At a roadside diner somewhere outside Springfield, Father Lance pulled in for lunch.

The waitress poured him coffee and asked where he was headed.

“California,” he said.

She blinked.

“In that thing?”

He patted the Beetle’s dashboard affectionately.

“She’s faithful.”

“Hope so,” she said. “That’s a long road.”

He smiled faintly.

“Yes,” he said.

“It is.”

By the time he reached New York, evening had begun to settle.

The sky turned copper and violet over the highway.

Father Lance drove mostly in silence, the radio murmuring quietly when the signal behaved itself.

At one point it drifted into static, then suddenly caught a fragment of an old hymn.

Be Thou My Vision.

He listened.

For a moment he thought about Jennifer McQueen.

Soon-to-be Sister Magdalene Mary.

The last time he had seen her she had been standing at the gate of the Poor Clare convent, looking strangely peaceful.

A different road.

A cloistered one.

But still a road.

He wondered if she was praying at that moment.

Probably.

Poor Clares did a lot of that.

“Pray for us travelers,” he said quietly.

The Beetle rolled westward.

Pennsylvania arrived in rolling hills and endless forests.

Father Lance slept that night at a roadside motel.

The neon sign flickered like a tired halo.

Inside the room he sat on the edge of the bed and unfolded the bishop’s letter again.

He had read it so many times the creases were turning white.

Father Lance Lake…

Your experience as pastor and spiritual counselor will be valuable…

The parish in California has faced certain difficulties…

That part had been underlined in his mind.

Difficulties.

Bishops had a way of choosing polite words.

He folded the letter again.

“St. Michael the Archangel,” he murmured.

Appropriate patron for difficult situations.

He said his night prayers, then lay down.

Outside, trucks groaned down the highway like distant thunder.

The road was already calling him again.

Ohio felt enormous.

Flat fields stretched under vast skies that seemed too wide for one pair of eyes.

Father Lance drove with the window open.

Cornfields blurred past.

Barns stood like lonely cathedrals of wood and rusted tin.

Every now and then he passed small towns with names painted proudly on water towers.

He stopped at gas stations where people stared curiously at the Roman collar.

One mechanic leaned into the window while the pump clicked.

“You a priest?”

“Yes.”

“Going somewhere holy?”

“California.”

The mechanic laughed.

“Well, Father, you got about two thousand miles of sinners between here and there.”

Father Lance chuckled.

“That keeps us employed.”

Illinois arrived quietly.

A sign.

A change in pavement.

Another long stretch of horizon.

Chicago loomed somewhere north, but Father Lance bypassed the city and drifted toward the beginning of a road that had lived in American mythology for nearly a century.

Route 66.

He pulled over beside the old highway sign.

The metal was sun-faded and slightly crooked.

Historic Route 66.

The Mother Road.

Father Lance stepped out of the Beetle.

Wind moved across the fields.

He looked down the long ribbon of asphalt disappearing into the distance.

“Well,” he said softly.

“Here we go.”

Route 66 had a strange rhythm.

It was not like the interstates.

The road curved through small towns and empty desert stretches, past old gas stations and weathered motels whose glory days had faded sometime around 1963.

The Beetle seemed happier here.

It chugged along like a pilgrim who knew the pace of a long journey.

Missouri.

Oklahoma.

The road stretched endlessly.

Sometimes Father Lance drove for an hour without seeing another car.

Sometimes the sky turned so wide and blue that he felt like a speck crawling across God’s canvas.

He prayed a lot on that road.

Not formal prayers.

Just conversations.

“Lord,” he said once somewhere in Oklahoma, “you know where I’m going better than I do.”

The wind whistled through the window.

“That parish in California… I hope I’m the right man.”

A tumbleweed bounced lazily across the road ahead.

“Then again,” he said, “you tend to pick unlikely people.”

The Beetle rattled in agreement.

Texas was hot.

Very hot.

Father Lance loosened the collar of his clerical shirt and drank warm soda from a glass bottle.

The road shimmered ahead like liquid glass.

Gas stations became rare.

The towns felt quieter.

At one lonely stop a Navajo man sat outside the store carving something from a piece of wood.

Father Lance bought a bottle of water and stepped outside.

The man held up the carving.

It was an archangel.

Sword raised.

Father Lance blinked.

“St. Michael?”

The man nodded.

“Protector.”

Father Lance bought it.

The carving sat on the dashboard afterward.

Watching the road.

New Mexico was like another planet.

Red earth.

Jagged mesas.

The sky burned orange at sunset like a cathedral window.

Father Lance drove through miles of open land where the road seemed to stretch forever.

There was something almost mystical about it.

He thought of the desert fathers.

Monks who fled into wilderness to wrestle with God and themselves.

Maybe every priest needed a desert sometimes.

Route 66 provided one.

Arizona brought mountains.

The Beetle wheezed a little climbing the long slopes.

Father Lance patted the dashboard.

“Almost there, old girl.”

But the road kept stretching.

One town blended into another.

Gas station.

Motel.

Diner.

Church steeple.

Then miles of nothing again.

At night the stars exploded across the sky in impossible numbers.

He had never seen so many.

Driving beneath them felt like sailing through the universe.

He thought about his life.

His vocation.

All the people he had met.

The souls he had tried to help.

The demons he had faced.

The quiet victories.

The hidden losses.

The road absorbed it all.

By the time California appeared on the horizon, the sun was setting again.

The desert glowed gold and crimson.

Father Lance’s Beetle rolled steadily forward, the little wooden archangel watching from the dashboard.

He didn’t speed up.

He didn’t slow down.

The road stretched ahead, long and patient, disappearing toward mountains and cities and whatever waited for him in that distant parish.

For now there was only the journey.

The endless ribbon of Route 66.

And the quiet hum of a faithful old car carrying a priest westward into the unknown.