The Open Road
The open road was flat and featureless. Locusts splattered against the windshield. Anxiety about time, speeding too fast—bats in the night flown past, mountain of trash.
Hung right a few years ago onto the Saw Mill River Parkway just to cruise along its curvature for a while, dodging potholes; did this countless nights, stoned. Always crashing out in the same car, never had a (serious) accident.
Immature, you were. Aging but not grown, nor capable. Still, there was a certain proprioceptive peace felt on the face fleetingly, a slight confidence that drooped down the shoulders while driving sometimes. Distance traversed, dark heaviness under eyes. Beaming forth, head light of thought. Here, gone. There, tomorrow already. Yesterday’s kill. Midnight turning a mile a minute, the asphalt fathomed for me.
She had a dream once that we wrecked halfway between my house and hers, and I sat there in the road cradling her lifeless body in my arms. Or was it my dream? It never came to pass anyways, so often as I feared it might. She had gephyrophobia, so I held her hand over the old Tappan Zee. We were going to the Palisades Center mall. We didn’t buy anything at the mall.
The road in the Pacific Northwest was very different. The sky seemed wider, for one thing. It crushed—wet, cold, gray steel. A man in a cowboy hat stood in the rain in the front yard of a single-story craftsman house, hugging a soiled teddy bear. He was always there whenever I went past on my way to the drive-thru Mexican restaurant, jaw clenching on Vyvanse; clutching the wheel to Drexciya on aux, automotive becoming submersible.
That summer, my father and I drove through the Badlands. The view was numbing and belittling. Beige gradient geological deathscape. We pulled over to see the prairie dogs. Rodentia shall inherit the earth.
At a roadside diner with a fifty-foot sign I ate a bison burger for the first and only time; it gave me indigestion and a decennial curse that will finally be lifted next year.
We cut across a corner of Wyoming overnight and didn’t see a single light. Montana sunrise wildfire ashes wafted through the air conditioning, snowfall from Hell.
Bought a mood ring for $11 at a rest stop passing through the Cascades and wore it for a year. It stayed black as my mood and my clothing.
I remembered Route One of my early childhood as a soft stretch of sea and sunshine. In the Casco Bay, I looked for the heads of seals surfacing. An American flag planted on a buoy.
I don’t drive anymore; I walk. Today I was chased for several paces by a leaf, which followed me skittering around a street corner. It was strange that a leaf should be so dry as to carry the wind, when the rest were rain-glued decomposing to the sidewalk.