The longest four miles I’ve ever experienced were in the Bahamas.

We flew to the Bahamas as a bit of a last-minute trip, escaping the cold of the Pacific Northwest winter in January. There, in the Bahamas, we experienced things like watching tourists flood off of the cruise ships and almost drowning, among other Caribbean experiences. We didn’t rent a car because we didn’t think we would need one, but after moving to Freeport on Grand Bahama, we realized we would need to rely on car transport more so than we did in Nassau.

The problem with the rentals, however, was the price. As we hadn’t budgeted for a car rental, the prices came as a shock to us. We also didn’t want to waste money on days that we didn’t need a rental car. What were we to do? Our rented condo was just too far from a lot of things, so we needed a solution.

The solution came easily. Parked in the condo parking lot was a bright red Jeep. I don’t know how the conversation started, but Douglas came back with the announcement we could rent the Jeep.

“Rent the Jeep?” I asked. “A random Jeep in the parking lot?”

“Yeah, I talked to the owner,” Douglas told me. The price was a little cheaper than a daily rental at a company, but it came with a greater advantage: we could rent it as needed, without paying for it daily. All we had to do was maintain the gas at the same level, and occasionally work around the owner’s need for the Jeep.

And with that, freedom was born. We got to travel all over the island, complete with the bizarre experience of driving in the Bahamas. Although it is a British colony and drives on the left, the cars are imported from the US, meaning the driver also sits on the left. You’re never too entirely certain if you are on the correct side of the road or not.

Regardless, we navigated it well. But one day, we encountered a problem.

I don’t know who did it, but someone emptied the gas tank and never filled it back up. Maybe it was us from the day before, or maybe it was the owner. Regardless, we found ourselves in need of a gas station. We decided to set out to our destination and would simply stop at the first gas station we saw along the way.

Well, there were no gas stations along the way. And the tank was rapidly emptying.

We started to worry a bit as we were getting further and further away from any kind of sign of civilization. We were driving through a forested area, with no town in sight. We were getting desperate. What if we ran out of gas right here? How far would we have to walk in the Caribbean heat? It wasn’t looking like a good prospect for us.

We saw a woman walking along the side of the road. Looking for some kind of assurance, we stopped the car and rolled down the window.

“Do you know where the nearest gas station is?” we asked.

“Yes, it’s just four miles straight down this road,” she replied, pointing in the same direction we were heading. We sighed with relief. Not only were we on the right path, but the light at the end of the tunnel was coming quickly. Four miles is nothing! We were going to make it after all. We noted on the odometer when our four-mile trip started so that we could track how far we still had to go.

Just like a watched pot never boils, a watched odometer never turns.

Not knowing when or if we would run out of gas, every mile crept by slowly. It was like the map, the odometer, and time all warped together to put us on an agonizing trajectory of uncertainty. Every mile was probably at least 10 miles. The odometer laughed at us as it stubbornly refused to turn each mile. The clock was a mockery to force us to endure the moments even longer.

Somehow we got to three miles and were still running. Probably on fumes, but running, nevertheless.

We waited and waited. “Come on, odometer,” we pleaded. We needed it to turn to four miles. Would it ever? And what would we do if that woman just made a random guess, and it wasn’t actually four miles? What if it was six miles, or ten miles, and the Jeep-space continuum never ended? What would we do?

Finally, after way too long and far more than four miles, the odometer moseyed onward to mile number four.

We looked at each other gleefully, then looked up at the road to find the gas station.

Lo and behold, right on the dot at four miles, the gas station appeared. How that woman was so incredibly accurate, I will never know. Maybe she was just the Jeep’s guardian angel.

We continued onward with our trip, meandering through a cute little town at the far edge of the island. Memorable, but less memorable than that gas station.

Four years later I would be facing it again.

————————–

It 2019, Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane. It stayed hovering over the island for a full 24 hours, destroying houses, trees, infrastructure, and lives. I found myself right back on Grand Bahama as a humanitarian aid worker.

The sights were familiar, but as though the damages reflect the way that memory is slowly altered over time. I found myself living our former trip, with memories coming back, including those of nearly drowning. We even stayed in rented condos in the same neighborhood that Douglas and I had stayed in our trip.

One day I joined the WASH team to check on one of their sites where they were working on fixing water pipelines and had a WASH station set up. Eager to get out of the office, I hopped in the car and took in the scenery of the destroyed land all around me.

I watched from my window as passed countless tens of thousands of trees stripped of their branches and leaves, their future uncertain now that the ground was salinized by the ocean water. I watched miles and miles of trees pass by before it dawned on me.

Could this be… the longest four miles?

When we went through it before, it struck me as a lush jungle that we could easily get swallowed up in. Now it was more like a weirdly planted telephone poles with nothing exotic about it.

But the road kept going, and the longer it kept going, the more I certain that this was indeed that road.

I was back on the longest four miles.

I was reliving a world I thought I would never see again, trying to still imagine that lush jungle while my eyes filled my mind with naked, salted telephone pole-like trees. How would those four miles appear to me this time? Would it still seem like a long way?

And… how did the gas station fare in the storm? Would it still be there? I had seen many ripped apart buildings, cars thrown into the ocean, airplanes near the airport now strewn into nearby fields and forests. Hurricanes are powerful forces to try to withstand.

Truthfully, I don’t remember at all where we met that woman—or Jeep angel—to count the longest four miles again. All I knew was the road went on forever. Even without knowing where to start counting, I knew it had been almost an hour since we left the office. If those four miles stood up to their name, it would still be a long time before we reached that gas station.

And, finally, we did.

If I hadn’t already known it was a gas station, I wouldn’t have been able to identify it as one. It would have been another unnamed building in the path of destruction, waiting to be bulldozed by its owners that might have some hope for rebuilding the future. But it was clearly that gas station—there were other points in my memory that stood out to me, and those points were verified even through the rubble. This was it.

One rusty pump remained. One wall of the convenience store stood. The beams outlining the station were there. A car was smashed and abandoned underneath a fallen pillar.

It was the first time in my life—and hopefully will be the only time—that I had been to a disaster zone before the disaster had struck, and could actually identify things that were out of place and no longer were what they were. Smashed, reshaped, warped, crumbling memories.

I took a photo of our four-mile gas station and sent it to Douglas. “Remember this place?” I asked him. He had no idea what it was, and was in disbelief when I told him it was our longest four-mile stop.

It turns out that the WASH project was also in the sleepy, little town at the end of the island—the same one we visited after the gas station. Like haunted, falling apart memories, the town was raised to life out of my memories and into my reality. Just as destroyed as the gas station, it, too, held a memorable place in my mind. It was unbelievable to see the town unraveled right before my eyes. Of all places in the world to visit on vacation and then return to a disaster, I had no idea this would be it.

I recently look on satellite maps to see if I could find the gas station and its process in recovery. As best as I can tell, from my vivid memory of its placement, the gas station has truly been wiped off the map. I found the spot that I remember it being, now a bare patch of earth, unused. After disasters, many things just go fallow, incapable of recovery. Our longest four-mile gas station was one of those.

But we keep that lifesaver alive in our memories even as we travel to this day. When a drive seems to be taking a long time, especially at a point of desperation to arrive, one of us will quip, “This is the longest four miles ever!”

And in that moment, we smile at each other and we know exactly what that means.