The moon was cut in half on the horizon. It is rare that we see the moon setting, but it is rare that we are on the road, awake at midnight. It is also rarer, for me, to be awake at that time when the bus has lurched and swayed on roads that curve and seem to swing back and forth along waves. The engineers who created these roads and ways have truly respected the curves of nature. Where there were huge mountains, they built the route around them; where there were giant trees, they cut around shrubs.
I should be passing the highway by now but, as the designs of these camineros show, these are still roads manually constructed and following the growth of soil and listening to the sound of grounds.
My night bus consorts, it seems, forever, with the devil moon. The closer we are to the eternal pallor on the sky, the more frustratingly remote the possibility that we can hit the moon and challenge its place in the night.
But I can feel something is going to happen. I know this in my years of traveling through these towns of diminishing light and imagined love. We pass by a grove of medium-tall trees and hardy bushes, the bus takes a quick glance at the visible darkness behind us and the bridge that is no more a bridge appears before us. We are circling and circling, but we are not being pushed by this powerful architecture; the technology of our transport understands the circle and radius of this artificial byway. These were made by machines with no love nor hate for the surroundings, just an embedded information that they should make this route into a turnpike or an expressway. We are entering a road that, by definition, is a private road. This is certainly not a free road. We are going to pay just to pass this highway.
If these expressways were not built, my bus would be passing through more towns. But that is not the case. Soon the curves and billows that are, it seems, natural to the human body, vanished. In front of us was the widest road ever—flat and straight. It would be the horizon, but one that has been created.
If I were a developer, I would certainly celebrate the human endeavor to progress. I would, in fact, following the ideas of those who wish to change the shape of this world, continue to build more ways that will expressly fly me away from the bends and blights. I would see no more the rivers and streams; I will just aviate and dart through open spaces: Here factories are built closer to transportation, and homes are isolated, as the exits to them are few and far in between. How did this happen that now we have this long kilometer of thoroughfare that has banished the towns and trees?
What are under these highways and freeways?
Beneath the speed of our journey are ancient trees and their roots. Under the cars that are in a hurry to reach the destination so that they could go back again to their origin are worlds that used to dominate the landscape and mindscape of the land.
Tales about the mighty creatures seducing young women are all there buried now. The tricksters—the elves of promises and wealth—are entombed beneath tollgates. Oceans of treasures—gold, diamond, emeralds, gifts of wise men—are interred without benediction, unless one calls progress a sacred trust. One doubts it because, as our night bus leaves the night and goes into the day, the markers at the highway are starting to make no sense anymore. No lanes ahead. Uneven roads. Barriers ahead.
Was a forest decimated when in the name of progress these mighty freeways were built? Perhaps, one should add more markers along the highway. What about “Great Forest Buried Under?” Or, please drive gently, “Living Dwarfs May Still Be Breathing Under Your Wheels!”
To make for the absence of magic—for that which they killed—highways have pavement markers. Some of these are “astro optics,” the new enchanted potion for those small lights that blink brighter when hit by the lights of vehicles. They gratify and beguile us. They are, without the knowledge of engineers and road scientists, subversive products. They remind us what are obscured by these grand passageways: the spell of nature; the magic of a slow life, as life should be; and the sorcery of what life is all about—that travel through space and time that is not intervened by cash.
Indeed, one marker that is amusing along the expressway is that which says, “Cash here.”
For those, therefore, who ask where life’s magic has gone? The answer is in highways that have disturbed the magic of the Earth. I know, you are smiling as you read this. That is expected. Anyone who believes me belongs to those who will be declared insane. We shall be subjected to rituals of appeasement and, worse, exorcism.
My dear Sylvia M., you say to Kristian C., alchemy is alive in Prague. Well, we are killing much of alchemy in our land as we build more roads that allow us to speed through nights of brave moons and days that remain as soft as early evenings.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano