on the highway
I’ve been driving on highways a lot these past few weeks, going to and from my farm with assorted bags of compost, seed trays, and tools in the back of my used Subaru. What this means is that within a few short months I’ve already had an innumerable amount of feelings on the I-76. I’ve been thinking a lot about highways and how the roads we travel on become part of our emotional landscapes. How the ways we move through space shape the tenor at which our feelings unfold, our relationship to sound and sight, the narratives we tell about other living beings.
I’ve seen many dead animals in the past few months of highway travel, more than I otherwise would. I usually avert my eyes at the first sight of fur and unmoving limbs, but the glimpses have shaped me nonetheless. There’s something about these moments that gestures towards the violence of the highway, the miles of concrete carved out through woodlands and forests, each of us in our wheeled boxes hurtling towards our destinations. Years ago, before I knew how to drive, I read Vanessa Veselka’s essay Green Screen, in which she talks about the lack of road narratives for women, her own harrowing experiences as a woman hitchhiker, and her research into the women routinely disappeared at truck stops throughout the interstate highway system. The highway is a place of harm. It’s a place of profound loneliness and alienation, built around the private interior space of the personal vehicle. If you don’t have control over your own vehicle, if you are forced to rely on the generosity of others to get where you need to go, the highway can be the end of you, the last place you were seen.
I’m more sentimental on the highway. I practice holding the wheel in my left hand, extending my other to rest on the thigh of an imaginary love. Driving in long straight lines and winding curves for forty-five minutes, an hour at a time, my music choices tend towards the romantic, the balladic, the pensive. I have time on the highway. I linger, suspended between the places where tasks must be completed and work must be performed. If the highway is a nowhere space, a place of ambiguous possibility and harm and horizon, it’s also a place where you can give yourself over fully to the contours of fantasy. The entire forty-minute dancehall mix. The whole album. Taking the highway feels like it’s made my thoughts longer, drawn out rather than chopped into small segments. I feel myself changing along with my modes of transportation, becoming shaped by the mundane brutalities and pleasures of my drives. The highway takes time, demands big chunks of the day in return for moments of romance and excess. I turn the music higher. I lean back into the arms of every feeling I’m carrying. I hurtle towards a group of chickadees playing on the asphalt, and they move out of my way just in time to save their lives.
Read More:
“The Racial Injustice of American Highways”
“Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters”