Category: American Place

I stand on the side of the road. For she has stood for me, stood for Freedom, for choices, for opportunities un-bounded. Of course, she stands for interruptions as well. Dead ends; roads closed; terminus and for some she is the end of all things before her. The end of a journey; the end of a life; the end of a generation of prosperity. As I stand on the black tar in the hot desert, the orange glow of the sun casting my shadow across the glimmering mirage that dissects her never-ending sprawl across the sand, I can’t help but feel lost. Evacuated from time and space. I don’t know if the sun is rising or setting. There are no clues but my own presence observing the history of her procession across this place. I fall to my knees as if to pray, kiss the hot gravel and feel the surge of every road I’ve ever taken — After hours of driving through the Rockies we reached the end with a washed out road and had to turn back the way we came. The miles of road we travelled all night from Walla Walla to Las Vegas on the bus, the city a beacon of light shining out of the desolate night. Trading cigarettes for whiskey with a Navajo man at 6am when I wasn’t old enough to have breakfast in the casino back in the days before anyone cared that you weren’t old enough to be in the casino buying breakfast and pulling slots. The long drives from Prescott to Oklahoma along I-40 (aka Rt. 66), Albuquerque being the mid-point where I always remembered the dancing cottonwood leaves shining behind the bridge as we pressed on for Texas. The back and forth between Lansing and Louisville via Indianapolis or Cincinnati where the highways were pulmonary arteries throbbing with American life. All of this pavement laid down over the bones of those whose land this once was. So many forgotten dreams of the dead who got in the way of the road’s progress. So much progress fallen under the knee of authority that presses faces into pavement until they can’t breathe because they believe this black road must be painted with white dividing lines. These bypasses that left behind and isolated these segregated communities who now struggle and cry for the American dream that was paved to make way for Amazon and the next off-ramp to the nearest Wal*Mart. And, yet I must defend her. She has given me so many choices; taken me time and again into the beauty of our mountains and forests. She has driven my dreams of change and fueled my ambitions to do something bigger with my life. She has done nothing to us or for us, yet she lets us be good or bad or something or no one. She is my friend and my lover and I must forgive her abuses by the hands of the unworthy. I must revel in her possibility to bring dreams into the night of our awakening dawn.