Letters to God
It’s mesmerizing how the wind practically sucks the papers from your hand and carries them around the contour of the car. Then for a moment, they swirl and dance, like snowy confetti, before littering the road and the ditch and leaving a brief, but beautiful blight on the environment.
I don’t recommend doing this.
And not only because of the damage it causes to Mother Nature.
Don’t do it, because you might get caught.
True, my friend, Melissa, and I had already performed this destructive act half a dozen times, but now we were down to our last notebook.
Our previous attempts were a paltry two or three pages at most. But what if we used an entire notebook this time? Could we release it just as another car passed by on this two-lane highway through the Sandhills of Nebraska? Would the driver believe they’d just passed through a sudden snow flurry?
Seemed worth a shot.
The project started innocently enough. We were in the backseat traveling to a BB-gun competition in Hyannis, Nebraska. Our rifles were in the hatch, our BBs meticulously sorted for dents, and we were without any sort of electronic entertainment. There weren’t even music options, as CD players were not standard-issue in the early 1990s, and we’d have as much luck mining for gold as we would finding a radio station without static.
We didn’t have much to do but contemplate our shooting competition. Far from being the best shot on the team, I usually managed decent scores in prone, sitting, and kneeling, but my inability to find a steady position in standing consistently dropped my scores out of medal contention. It seemed I needed a miracle to get me out of my standing slump.
Melissa and I were both good Catholic girls, at least in the sense that our parents took us to church each Sunday and we’d taken our First Communion and whispered our sins to the priest during our First Confessions. Our religious upbringings gave us the idea that maybe we should ask God to help our BBs find their way to the bullseye zone.
Prayers were fine, but it seemed God might take our pleas more seriously in the written form.
Road trips in the days before cell phones, and especially road trips in western Nebraska where you could drive hours without seeing so much as a gas station, meant we were prepared with notebooks, coloring books, colored pencils, and pens. We didn’t rush the writing process. We had nothing but time and a scattering of cows on the horizon.
After meticulously writing out our requests, we leaned back in our seats, pleased with ourselves, and basking in the surety that God was pleased with us.
But how to deliver the letters? There wasn’t a post office within a hundred miles, and it wasn’t as though a mailman would know what to do with an envelope marked: God, Heaven, Air Mail.
Our gaze wandered out the window. The grasslands stretched to the horizon, with enough undulating hills to make a person seasick. What if . . . ?
We cracked the window open. My dad either didn’t notice, or more likely, chose to ignore us, grateful we’d found a way to entertain ourselves without pestering him with increasingly ridiculous questions.
When you slip a piece of paper out of a moving vehicle, you feel the drag of air resistance, and if you are an imaginative kid with hours on the road and nothing much to do, you can believe the tug against the paper is the hand of God, reaching out to take the letter you’ve written Him. Then when you let go, there’s a quick sucking sound, followed by white noise.
Letter delivered.
That whoosh left us with a kind of high. We watched the letters take flight, bending and floating on the air streams. How pretty that paper looked against the background of the frosted January prairie grass.
Our religious fervor increased. If one letter to God was good, wouldn’t two be better?
We were holy rollers by the time Dad rolled us into the parking lot. We’d prayed just about every prayer we could think of, and some of them we’d prayed twice. We smiled as we unloaded our guns, because we carried more than our shooting paraphernalia into the aluminum-sided building. We carried our most secret and powerful weapon—God Almighty Himself.
The tournament proceeded as usual. My prone scores were so good I’d already started drafting my return letter of thanks to God for the drive back. I lost a few points on sitting, but kneeling went about average. All in all, things were looking good. But when it came to standing, things fell apart as they always did.
That day felt like a double defeat. I didn’t medal, but worse, it seemed God had just taken my letters and scattered them like detritus along the highway.
We both had hand cramps from gripping our pens on the drive to Hyannis and from gripping our triggers during the competitions. We were down to our last notebook and we didn’t want to waste it.
At this point, we were silly tired and we’d long ago rubbed off the holiness of the morning. We giggled in the glee of how we’d gotten away with sending so many letters to God, and how the paper sort of danced in the air like a snowstorm. Wouldn’t it be funny, we thought, if we ripped up an entire notebook into tiny shreds and released them in a blizzard for the next oncoming car?
We’d have to time it right. Cars, like gas stations, were few and far between. They say idle hands are the devil’s playground, but I think he was making pretty good use of our busy fingers. We ripped paper until our fingers were numb. Not once did my dad ask what we were doing. He probably figured it was better if he didn’t know.
At last we had a mountain of paper shredded between us. Impressed with our own progress, we turned our attention out the window to initiate the next phase of our plan.
We could barely contain our excitement when we spotted a car in the distance. At just the right moment, we manually cranked down the window. Seconds later we were tossing a storm of shredded paper out the window.
Slipping a folded piece of paper out of a moving vehicle is one thing. We didn’t anticipate the struggle of shoving an entire avalanche out the window. Half the paper blew right back at us, causing a mini-whiteout inside the car. Outside the papers swirled in a maelstrom, but not with the efficiency we hoped. The passing car continued on its path, completely unfazed by the unexpected snow squall.
Dad’s car was another matter.
It came to a complete halt.
It took a lot to make my dad mad, and even then he didn’t yell. But there was no question when he got out of the driver’s seat and practically dragged us into the ditch. “Pick up the paper!” he demanded.
“But there’s so much of it,” I pleaded. “We can’t pick it up.”
“Get to work.”
He reentered the car and closed the door behind us. Melissa and I squatted down in the ditch, which was covered in literal snow. “How are we supposed to find white paper in the white snow?” she asked.
“Let’s just stay out here for awhile and say we picked it up,” I suggested.
Honestly, there wasn’t much paper that we could find, likely because it had blown about a mile down the road behind us.
“It’s cold out here,” Melissa said.
“My fingers are freezing,” I said.
Just then a semi-truck barreled down the highway, laying on its horn as it passed us.
“Oh my God,” I said. “They probably think we’re peeing in the ditch.”
Soon we were laughing so hard, we nearly peed our pants.
“How long do you think we have to stay out here?” Melissa asked.
“I don’t know.” I eyed my dad, but he remained immobile in the driver’s seat.
After what seemed like an hour, but was likely only ten minutes, Dad climbed out of the car and called us back inside. For once he didn’t have to ask us twice to do something. Turns out, it takes a lot longer to clean up a blizzard than to make one. We stifled our giggles, knowing Dad might know we didn’t learn our lesson if we didn’t seem downtrodden.
Once we got our laughing fit under control, we looked around for something to do, but sadly, we’d already thrown all our entertainment out the window. We learned a little bit about conservation that day and about using our resources.
Next time we’d have to bring extra notebooks—and maybe a trash bag.
Authors Note: As an adult who cares about the environment, I do not condone littering. I’m also doing my part to make sure my children never repeat the mistakes of my childhood—by giving them unlimited screen time during long road trips. Nature stays clean. Everyone stays sane. You're welcome, Mother Nature.
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