‘Sometimes the placement of a spider’s web necessitates a leg that stretches into the branches, a single, foundational strand that is separate from the rest. ‘The Long Dark’ is the American strand, tense with reaching into Alaska and cold for being kept underground, a monstrous, pre-treaty highway between the continental states and their wayward cousin. It is desolate road, widely abandoned, minimally maintained. There is nothing on this earth so desperate as to make its home there and so ‘The Long Dark’ is also reasonably safe for travel.
There are phones attached to the walls of ‘The Long Dark,’ phones placed in five-mile increments for break-downs and other automotive emergencies. Each flashes red and each is made dusty by disuse. Unfortunately, for all the phones in ‘The Long Dark,’ there is only one entrance and only one exit and they are far, far apart.
It is not uncommon to hear stories of ‘The Long Dark,’ of being stranded there. They tell of ghosts and rats and quiet, reptilian sighs in the shadows, of voices on the phones and the lingering scent of death. These stories are untrue, but they convey, with a certain poetic inaccuracy, what it is like to be there, waiting for rescue, amidst the flashing red and the smell of old asphalt.’
Just a short ride into ‘The Long Dark’ I stop to remove my helmet, thinking that the stifling air is my own breath, the smell of healing gums and dry spit. It helps, some, and it means I begin to hear the phones ringing as I pass- not every phone, but enough to realize they ring for me. Somebody is trying to reach me from the outside.
The ringing stops halfway through, and I know the Stranger is following again. For the first time in a while, he and I are on the same path.
But now I’m leading.
-traveler
