"Driving song"
NICE is gone but Mac's not:
I like driving. You get to see lots of things. Or like, the exit signs to lots of stuff. On the road itself we stay pretty much the same, radio on, steering with your knees. Every so often you’ll see a couple of cows fenced in, chewing grass toward the passing automobiles. Every so often you’ll see in the median a crippled Jeep Grand Cherokee, blackberry pearl, crimped hood and two dusted headlights. Wearing a caution tape dressing like some wounded Halloween decoration.
Depending on the strength of it you’ve got maybe 90 minutes with each radio signal whose breadth you come across. Maybe a hundred clicks from the Kennebecasis Valley you start getting whispers from the Christian station coming through the veil of static, a distant alarum beamed into the dashboard speaker from 40 meters above average terrain. Running north to New Maryland it melts into the country station, phasing between damnation and Ford nation with a strange enthusiasm.
If you go for long enough the place names start to repeat themselves. I imagine a big foundry stamping out newly minted Windsors, Stratfords, Beaumonts with only a vague attempt at quality control between them. Coming off the roller bed casting those ethylbenzene stink lines, shooting new car smell into the atmosphere. Each equipped with a dying mall and aging population, call centers and service stations and dollar stores and cheque cashing places. Starving and friendly cats installed on alternating corners, kids waving at passing cars for a laugh at their drivers’ puzzled faces.
Every offramp is a tributary splitting off this great river, each car a cutter coughing itself through the tangled marshes of truck stops and tourist traps, hauling peat moss or mailbags or bootleg cigarettes onto the Ashnola shore. Or maybe the Bluewater is an organ, leeching its lifesblood from the little villages and vacation homes stippling either side of the toll highway. My 2011 Chevrolet Aveo a single white blood cell dancing down the bruised throat of the coastline.
Climbing the horizon just before dawn, I am the sunrise shouting down its light onto the open face of the barren 102. Above is a towering thunderhead threatening snow from the top of the troposphere like a gunman with his finger on the trigger. If you close your eyes and drift to the either edge of the lane you can let the shoulder usher you forward, blind but for your trust in the road, the deep groan of the rumble strip filling the cabin like the voice of God. I shake myself awake and roll the window down to get some cold air on my face. I don’t mind driving at all.
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