Do ghosts haunt the highway, or does the highway haunt me? in anticlimatic

It was deliciously warm last night so I took advantage. Set out around 9:00pm and pedaled my bicycle through the long series of parking lots behind the storefronts on the west side of town. Beyond them were the fairgrounds, and then the end of town. A wedding was going on there, so the gates were open, and I helped myself to their roads and walkways- even doing a lap around the demolition derby track under the grandstand. The fairgrounds are on a large flat plane, bordered to the north by a chain link fence and the highway, and a steep wooded hill climbing upwards to the south, with a few ancient paths and two-tracks, where the carnies and livestock traders usually set up their campers during the end of summer fair.

I attempted these trails snaking up the hill until it became too dark to continue, and stopped. Behind me stretched a broad and distant vista of mostly darkness. Below, a barren fairground with only a single light in the distant corner of it (from the wedding party). In the distance, the black void of the bay- a few twinkling houses visible beyond it, 5-10 miles straight across the water. And between the two, the highway out of town- streetlights placed every 100 meters or so, more like a trail of breadcrumb beacons than something to actually light the road.

As I stood up there and gazed a single truck owned the road, moving from east to west, out of town. It was far enough away that all I could hear of it was the distant cawww sound vehicles seem to make at their furthest reaches to the human ear. I was captivated, watching it move slowly from beacon to beacon, wondering who was in that cab, where they were going, what kind of life they lived.

And then in my guts this twisting feeling, and a scattershot of memories splattered in front of my eyes. Old automobiles in transit, both direct memories and conjecture. That smell of 1970s car leather and exhaust. If the city is civilization’s heart, as an organ, then the roads are its veins. I like to think of roads as a single entity, the way we consider all of our skin a single organ. A single entity not necessarily bound by time. You know those images of highways that people take when they leave the shutter open, and it’s just lines of flowing red and lines of flowing white?

Locking spirits in the ground, or in a house, doesn’t feel right. Too stationary for the nature of the subject matter. But on the roadways, in the endless swirling motion of transit, something feels more appropriate. A paradox of a place- somewhere that always moves, but seldom moves. A sort of mixing vortex where souls can originate, and return.

Something to keep in mind this halloween season.