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Writers Corner |
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Concerning The Imminent Departure Of Highway 100
Highway 100 was weary. And low-minded. And worried about its nerves, flayed to the bone like the flesh of a cat-lashed sailor. Some mornings, rather than face the day, it felt like rolling off its roadbed into the bog and burying its troubled face in peat.
There was much that Highway 100 didn’t like about its life. Too frequently, it burst uncontrollably into tears. Sometimes an elemental fierceness howled from its reptile brain. It feared it might do something foolish.
Perhaps it was a petty thing but Highway 100 liked neither of its names: its official one, or its nickname. Being designated simply as a number on government-issued road maps certainly diminished self-esteem and being referred to locally as Access Road was a shark bite to the tender belly of individuality.
Access Road, indeed! Made it sound as if Highway 100 was just a means to an end, a servant, not an entity unique in its own right. And 100 a plain-faced cipher.
What Highway 100 longed for when it rocked itself in anguish, hugging its belly to ease its misery, was an ennobling name that set it apart. Something that spoke of strength and endurance and bravery. A name like Hector the Trojan, perhaps.
Highway 100, emulating Hector, that embattled hero of ancient Troy, endured winter. It endured the gashes and scrapes scoured into its tender flesh by the grinding blades of snow plows. It endured the sting of the briny witches’ brew of road salt, sand and assorted precipitation mashed into its open wounds by the thick treaded snow tires of many a thousand automobiles.
Despite the urge to pull its blankets of snow up to its chin and lie abed like a reluctant school boy, it cast off it covers and faced the elements wind and snow and pestiferous plows.
In spring Highway 100, unlike Hector, wept. It shed a few brief tears of joy that it had survived another winter, but mostly it leaked tears of woe. Winter’s freezes and thaws had pocked-marked Highway 100's face, exfoliating chunky scabs of asphalt that lay on its shoulders like the shed scales of moulting dragons. Highway 100 wept of embarrassment and shame, of true purpose unfulfilled.
Highway 100 vowed to enjoy summer. It stiffened its upper lip and welcomed almost hysterically, it seemed tourists and natives alike with wide open lanes. Yet daily anguishing events encroached.
Workers climbed down from trucks loaded with steaming tar and shovelled dollops of melted asphalt into the open sores pock-marking Highway 100's cheeks a salve that spread infection more than it healed and made Highway 100 ache to lash out ferociously.
Hordes of automobiles cars, trailers, motorcycles, busses swarmed over Highway 100 constantly, swarmed like the hosts of Greeks that wave after relentless wave attacked Hector’s Troy.
Highway 100 knew it was wrong when it vented its spleen on the worst annoyances of all those soul-scourging transport trucks. When the chaffing torment could be borne no longer, Highway 100 asserted itself. It snapped its teeth at the time wishing for fangs on the hot, vulcanized tires of the eighteen-wheelers, tore off chunks and spat the chewed rubber across it heaving chest a warning.
One day in the height of summer though, Highway 100 did something that horrified itself. It was a deed no Hector would commit. A deed so appalling that Highway 100 knew it had to change its life, for its own sake and for the sake of innocents.
One moon-washed night, after a day that had pommelled it last firm fibre, Highway 100, nodding off, curled comfortably alongside a tranquil pond, found itself growing agitated by the approaching sound of a speeding automobile, bizz-buzzing through the moonlight like a lone tantalizing mosquito.
Something feral and primitive held its breath in Highway 100 until the high whine of the auto neared its ear. Then, like Hector’s horse whipping it tail to smatter a gadfly perhaps, Highway 100, with a vicious flick of its finger catapulted the loaded car off its neck into the bordering bogs.
Intentional, murderous violence.
Immediately, Highway 100 was overwhelmed with guilt and remorse that life had come to this end, that it would behave so maliciously. It was time to be decisive, to suck up the anguish of its life, to rein its beasts and make some changes, to seek asylum.
Highway 100, no Hector, no hero, commenced to roll itself up, its tail curling towards it head until it arrived at the port, at the ferry dock. There, like a giant jelly-roll, it climbed onto the flat bed of a despised tractor-trailer and hid itself beneath a tarpaulin. Quietly, furtively, it waited for morning when the truck would board the ferry and the ferry would embark for the west.
Departure was imminent.
Harold N. Walters
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