Interstate 15

At dawn there was a great whistle from the train tracks that run through the neighborhood. It seemed too early, but a steam engine was blundering through the sleeping town and leaving no person unaware. It seemed a good day for the road.

We spend the morning playing catchup, saying do you remember, in Paris..? and the waitress can't refill my bottomless coffee cup enough times as the hours while away. When we parted ways in the parking lot, and the sun shone that way it only does there, my shoulders getting warm, the blossoming trees quickly shifting to green, my lungs itched to stretch out. I drove past the corner where we bought our first car, the day we landed in America because you are not, before you have one, sped down that familiar hill on the street that widens every year, past Wal-Mart and the Community College, to the freeway intersection that has evolved into a monster. Every time we would get on that freeway, and the sign south said "Las Vegas", my mother and I would joke that we would get on it one day and just go there. Every time the same joke. Every time the same responsible exits in time. Today I switched lanes, and I headed south.

I drove to the end of the valley, with that elusive last mountain at the end, and I thought just one more valley as the speed limit rose in silence. The hills turned greener around me, new mountains appeared in the distance, always new mountains and I thought just one more valley, just seeing what's beyond that hill, and put the car on cruise control. The sands turned red in the afternoon sun, the cities faded to wild country, traffic thinned out. The great wide roads of the American West lay endless ahead, whispering of solitude and freedom, of silence and enlightenment, and I followed that road until my limbs were numb.

It should seem naïve to think the Answers would come, simply from a highway chase into unknown lands. But as I sat on that mountain top, with the soft winds of the Southwest on my cheeks, overlooking billowing valleys that spread in every direction, the pieces fell quietly into place, arranged themselves neatly on my internal map, settled in and became clear. I turned back to the heaving car, exhausted from the mad dash into oblivion, and rolled it slowly down the gravel hill we so carefully climbed together. The freeway lay wide and calm at our feet again. We turned back north. Carried a piece of the madness, in our tracks.