How Did You Get Here So Fast?

Her head was pitched back against the driver’s headrest, her jaw slack as the Lexus SUV idled through the intersection. If Jill and I could have seen her eyes, we’d have seen only the whites. No hands appeared on the steering wheel.

“Holy shit,” I said, leaning forward to the windshield. “I think that driver’s unconscious.”

A Boy on Sargent Road

Friday’s rush-hour traffic has me looking for a path of least resistance. I exit the interstate in favor of side roads. Driving home toward Fishers, I turn onto Sargent Road -- a shaded route that lazes its way northeast through Marion County.

Settlers first entered the Mud Creek Valley here in 1824. The farmhouse with chipped white paint and a latticed porch still stands where Johnny Sargent's father built it in the 1880s. 

Across the road and obscured by overgrowth, a sagging barn guards the entrance to the fallow field where Johnny flew in and out with his J-3 Piper Cub in the mid-1950s.