A thin sliver of cell service reaches me at just the right moment and, rather than risk losing it for a more convenient pullover, I balance the motorcycle on the far edge of the shoulder and wait for the map to load. ‘The Hair Dump’ is not a tourist friendly place- not hidden, exactly, but purposefully unadvertised to prevent gawkers and fetishists from hanging around the front and trying to take pictures or collecting stray hair.
I confirm where I’m headed and pocket my phone in time to see a brunette tumbleweed flop lazily down the center of the highway.
Rumor has it that bribing one’s way into ‘The Hair Dump’ isn’t particularly hard, but I think I’ll content myself with the view from the gate.
‘One assumes the government could manufacture a reasonable explanation for its federally funded collection of disposed human hair but it chooses not to. Instead, it all but refuses to acknowledge the existence of ‘The Hair Dump’ and speaks in threatening legalese to those who broadcast its location.’
A day later I stand over the bike in the parking lot of a department store, watching it shudder and choke and wondering what I could have possibly done to the thing. A man, loading groceries into his SUV, breaks away from his family and approaches, wordlessly kicking the exhaust with his boot. The pipe coughs out a baseball-sized clump of hair: jet black with blonde highlights. It expands slightly and rolls off in the breeze.
“What it is to be young,” the man chuckles, watching the thing depart.
Now, when I think of aging, I think of that little ball of hair and I wonder what wisdom the man had hoped to impart.
-traveler
