Works in Progress
It was later than I expected by the time I’d finished packing the truck. I’d hoped to be two hours on the road already, and with the lost time I was already resigning myself to a night of driving those dark and foreboding roads that only the American West has to offer, the ones where even the stars feel more distant than they are. I’d been planning this short excursion for over a year now, but the date had been tossed around like a can kicked down the road. As the days came and went, and I’d all too placidly mumble to myself “well maybe sometime next month,” and with little more thought stumble out the door and back into the routine of life, that dull humdrum that keeps us just stimulated enough to make it to the next day. So now, almost half a decade since I had originally committed myself to it, I was once again stumbling out the door, for what, I hoped, would be the final time. Slipping the key under the doormat, I looked back one last time and then launched myself forward without delay, into the chilly fall afternoon.
By the time I had made it onto the road the sun was already setting and the flat pavement that stretched out before me made the spectacle blinding. Rush hour commuters swirled around me and I moaned, raged, panicked, and, finally, let go. Then I floated with them. Like a river they carried me past the shopping centers and warehouses that marked our collective decay. On ramps transformed into springs, feeding life into our wonderful river, while off ramps and the swirling lights of police cars and ambulances were eddy currents threatening to pull us under, to pull me back in. And yet, we flowed, and I floated on, out past the cramped parking lots and into the sprawling suburbs we drifted, and like a funerary procession they carried me with fanfare and applause. Hoisted over their heads, I looked down as horns transmuted to trumpets, and the litter that marred the shoulders, bouquets of flowers, all laid out in honor of me. They carried me towards the light, and onward I continued until, at last, I found myself alone, hurtling at 80 miles an hour into the black night that stretched out before me.
I felt microscopic crawling along those arteries of asphalt stretched thin over distances I could hardly comprehend. Like the veins in the hands of someone you love, you recognized some distinctly, while others are novel and you try to place them in relation to everything else. Distance fails, and so, needing delineation, I reach to measure my progress in time. When time, once again, fails, I remember that time and space are invariably connected, so that one cannot be separated from the other, and realizing this I remember that the crosstimbers give way to the plains, the plains give way to the sage scrub, the sage scrub gives way to the desert, and they all give way to the road. Satisfied that time and distance are arbitrary, and neither is important tonight, I instead lose myself in the twinkling stars and distant thunderstorms that mark the desert this time of year, in the concrete yet ephemeral rawness of experience beyond delineation. The sublime doesn’t speak back to me, it has nothing to say. The sun is barely cresting the mountains behind me by the time I arrive at my destination. The trail is frosty in the cool air but the rocks, appearing immortal, have already melted in the morning rays. I contemplate a nap, but I am moving to get on the trail before I make up my mind, and once inertia has taken over it would be too difficult to change direction.
It was startling when I woke up, the low hum of the fan, disorienting and peculiar. I half expected to open my eyes and find a motel room or a hostel bunk, the faint smell of cigarette smoke certainly suggested as much. But I knew, deep down, I was in bed, at home, worlds away from the cool desert nights that seemed to call to me from beyond my own understanding. I opened my eyes to find the early light of dawn just beginning to creep in through the blinds and the faint sound of birds fluttering at the feeder outside the window. And, as I did, I smiled, and with a happy huff, began to roll my boulder once more up the hill.
