This blog is closed
Drivers
At times the earth rises up, shrugs slightly, sloughs off a layer of itself. Our world comes undone. It runs downslope, a melting of the earth’s too-solid flesh. A momentary nudge of fault, a moth landing on a sodden hillside, and then the cascade of rock.
I have longed for the earth to open up at times beneath me, to reclaim my carbon and potassium, a pocket of calcinated moisture pressed against the horizon of the subsoil. There were pieces of metal down there, I had heard, buttons and lead shot from a Revolutionary battlefield that city gardeners would dig up, put on their mantels. I could not move, not yet. A mile from her house and I collapsed. I had not seen it coming, this ending, and my eyes still burned raw.
A nineteen-year-old sitting on the guardrail. Red taillights in the night rain. Each pair of lights traced the same long night arc, one pair and then the next, identical geometry in iteration, their drivers shades, specters hardly lit at all by dashboards. I was as obscure to them, I thought, opaque and olive-drab, unknowable and immediately forgotten.
And each of those unseen must be as caught up in their lives as me. A thousand pairs of taillights passed, perhaps two thousand stories. Heading for the night shift, dinner with a new lover, a funeral, the grocery store for cat litter, heading nowhere to escape the parents, thousands of stories. This red night river was iteration and volition both. How many of these people had had their heart ripped out that day? How many had lived through that, had it grow back, like mine would, to be ripped out yet again and worse, shackled to this mundane crag?
Two weeks ago I stood on the road and peered through the line of stopped cars on the Interstate. People griped. The feedlot was right there, and we were breathing ammoniated clouds of moist valley air with exhaust. One by one we turned our engines off, walked back and forth along the road. After ten minutes some drove across the median, or up the nearby on-ramp the wrong way, but I was far from home and patient. At last we moved, and five miles on we passed the wreck, two vehicles, one with its driver’s seat fair smeared across the road. At least one person’s life ended that day, at least one story utterly extinguished, and the rest of us groused at the minor inconvenience. The tragedy of weekday morning radio: some innocent dies an agonizing death. We curse them for making us ten minutes late for work. We are an infinite, opaque iteration of a squalid geometry, atomized and linear.
Sometimes the earth shrugs slightly, rises up. Four days ago a hill gave way, sent mud and rock down on the interstate. Huge concrete piers were tossed about like straws. Three hundred feet of road were buried. The hills around here do not hold their shapes for long. The mantle boils, and massive slabs of earth rub lingeringly against each other, coax mountains up out of the depths to tower and fold back down against themselves. We draw our little lines upon the ground. The ground moves then to swallow them, impassively rejecting our conceits. A lane is closed, then two, and we must merge.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
chris, i know your roads. and your gripes. and the angst, i think. thanks, brother, for saying it so well. merging is a good skill.
By: By kathy a on 2006 05 03
I’ve been trying to figure out how to not drive my requisite 1500 miles a week this summer. It isn’t an easy fix, and it seems important to solve; to do my best to reduce my own personal energy use. Since i don’t drive at all the other nine months, i can justify all manner of rationales for cruising the great western interstates. There is so much to be said for the hundreds of little places i stop and find respite out along the highways. But somehow, this year there is something else in the air. I’m not quite sure what it all means yet, but it requires my paying attention. Maybe your post here holds a hint. Merging along I-5 is the most common cause of those kinds of accidents.
By: By spyder on 2006 05 04
Here in Northern New Mexico, people leave crosses on the side of the road in memorial to a family member whose been killed in a car accident. The crosses remain in their spots for years, often decorated with bright and tacky plastic flowers, weeping vines, paint of every color, statues, photographs.
Sometimes I drive past them and think—a gaudy reminder.
By: By I Gallop On on 2006 05 04
I drop by this page occasionally, looking for some good writing. This definitely qualifies from my perspective. I used to live in South Dakota and they would put up signs that said ‘Think’ where there were fatal accidents. They put up one sign for each victim, and the signs stick around for years-not as much hill movement there.
By: By Ethan on 2006 05 04
Categories:
Recommended
Biography
Science
The Neighborhood
