Crown Point, Monday

Interstate driving is subtraction. It’s whittling yourself down white dash by white dash until you’re finally as simple as you were supposed to be.

It’s meditation. It’s watching white windmills on mile 191 fade into a horizonless winter backdrop. Line after line stretching back into the fields, hypnotic three-blade turn, slender metal arms diving after one another. Wait. There’ll be a moment when they synchronize, when you could line up all those windmills and pass your arm through the space between their blades, press the sun into your palm without touching a single one. Watch. It’ll only be a moment. You can keep your eyes off the road for a second; your hands do all the driving, anyway. The sun’s been setting earlier each day. It’s time you learned by touch.

It’s three hours of fogging up the windshield with singing, pretending your breath is what spins those pinwheel windmills. Wind power, mind power; an m is just a w flipped upside down. It’s finding out you have more to sing than you have to say. Somehow, someone else’s words could tell a stranger more about you than you could. You’d like to say it’s because you’re a work of art, something deeper than a slapdash splash of rotting paint on a genetic canvas, but you know better. It's simpler and more beautiful than that. 

Highway driving is solace. It’s pulling yourself home by that double yellow line on the asphalt, that elongated equal sign you could take as a metaphor for eternity if you let yourself think too much (which you do: roads like rivers feed into each other, everything loops back into itself, everything is everything). It’s passing a car going the opposite way and imagining you both watching the other and thinking, yeah, I’ve been there. 








wind power