prompt: stretch, title: come morning I'll be through them hills and gone in misc. flash fiction

If we were being optimistic, we could say America is defined by its vast natural beauty, purpled mountains majesty, amber waves of grain, redwood forests, Gulf Stream waters, all that maudlin mush. Less pollyanna but still charitable, America is its huge throbbing cities, megaliths ghoulish and sublime, sure, gobbling up dreamers and evacuating nervous wrecks, still at least generating art and innovation as a residue of all that cruel commercial digestion. But in our hearts-of-hearts, we all know what America actually is. America’s an endless network of roadways, an enormous stretch of highways oozing past the horizons, the blank flat ouroboros connecting outer-borough to outer-borough, an infinity wyrmling looped upon itself to consume not only its own tail but to also feast upon its own excreta until the day it finally bursts. Not cities, not forests, not the folks within it, not the points upon the maps, rather the lines that get you from dot-to-dot. The destiny once augured by Hopi mystics become horribly manifest, the land once choked by the snakes of iron, now a continent from sea-to-shining-sea, restrained by these arid acrid rivers of oily stone.

But that’s what life is, too, a road. It feels like a short trip on a highway that goes on forever but, in the end, as a friend from my short time in Brooklyn once wrote, “they’re lying when they tell you it’s a short life you’re living, it’s the longest thing that you did.” It’s not the brief points that seem either marvelous or mortifying for an instant along the way, it’s that monotonous thrum of wheels to pavement as you sputter through from cradle to grave that truly constitute your life. A song silly and sad and maddening and beautiful all at once.

Midnight in Amarillo, driving to LA, we told the clerk we were moving to Hollywood, his mouth said he did Austin summer stock but his eyes begged us to strap him to our car with bungies, get him out of that redneck nightmare, to the city of dreams. Driving back years later, broke, at the Grand Canyon, a wonder of the world paling against the fact one of the other tourists had a pet simian, my then-girlfriend correctly more impressed by the notion of getting to hold a monkey.

The tourist traps themed around ancient racisms so outdated and divorced from reality, wigwam motels, South of The Border firework shops, that the offense is almost at this point forgivable in antiquated absurdity. Almost. That hotel hallway just outside of Saugerties where it looked like a live wasp nest but upon further reflection was probably a fake and a dead-drop for drug deals.

The weird little moments, horrible and beautiful both, along the roadside on our way, a corner in Winslow Arizona, that snow upon Raton, that’s America, that’s life. All we can do is try to keep moving, focusing on those weird surprises along the way for as long as it lasts. For however long we last.