I miss the truck, sometimes, which was as much a home as a means to end this long task I have set out to accomplish. The bike gets me where I’m going (and many places I don’t mean to go), but it is more companion than shelter- a pet that trades service for fuel and good care. I see more on the bike- I experience more, for better or worse. Every warm day and every drop of rain. The smell of blossoming orchards and of drying leaves. I feel the lazy shadow dragging behind me and whipping in the wind. I worry, still, that it may get pulled up under the tires like an errant scarf, leading to some sort of eldritch maiming.
It hasn’t, yet.
I would get lost in the truck. Not on the road but inside the truck itself, in the landscape of plastic wrappers and ancient stains. Most miles would pass unnoticed and unremembered, ‘gray roads’ in a different sense, in the sense that they might as well not exist for all the evidence I would be able to conjure up in retrospect. Dark roads, then, like dark matter- the mysterious glue that holds it all together, that is endlessly expanding.
Where do we go in the time between things?
‘Though perhaps not exclusive to America, ‘The Traveler’s Sojourn’ maintains facilities along so much of the country’s infrastructure that the author would be remiss in excluding it. Accessible by car, bus, and train, the ‘Sojourn’ offers the weary mind a short respite in a place that is just outside the vehicle’s glass.
Tempting as it might be to question the purpose of the ‘Sojourn,’ or to assume that such a service is not without a price, it has persisted in being a relatively benign phenomenon. Perhaps, in our hurry to conflate the otherworldly with the grim, we neglect to consider any other world’s mundanity. Perhaps ‘The Traveler’s Sojourn’ is no more than a sun-warmed rock- a place to be for no reason but to be there.’
-traveler
