April 20, 2003

• I’ve been driving these roads all my life. I grew up not far from here, into a family of less fortunate circumstance, but managed to walk the few yards separating me from something better.
  
  These roads, they sing a certain song that you can only hear if you’re listening. Like the AM radio. You have to filter out the static and ride the tuning knob. You make the song when you try to hear it. You ride the roads and sing yourself a ballad, but you can only hear it if you work at it.
  
  I once met a man who drove this road quite a bit. He was old and had white hair and the kind of face that comes from a long struggle with the asphalt.
  
  This old man told me about the song he heard. He was sayin’ that, early on, he thought the hum of the wheels and the rush of the air were the things you had to tune out, the things you had to try and ignore. But slowly, over decades, he began to realize that it was exactly the opposite. Every bit of the hum and every molecule of air was part of the song, and those were the things you had to listen to. Whereas before he’d turn the radio up loud, now he left it off except when he needed things like weather forecasts.
  
  He’d come up with a sort of orchestral understanding of tires, and he claimed to be able to tell what kind of song a car would make as it cut through the wind, simply by looking at its shape. He said that when he met people, he’d look at their car to understand their song. He’d feel their car, running his fingers along the seams in the sheet metal, putting his ear to the hood, as if listening for a pulse.
  
  I asked him how he’d describe the songs he’d heard. Predictably, he answered that it wasn’t something you could articulate with words. He said you could only do some other artful thing in reaction, and that there was no carbon copy for the moment of a song.
  
  I distinctly remember the part about no carbon copies, because I had been thinking about the ozone layer, and how it’s getting all screwed up with carbon emissions. How the song of the car and the song of of the driver were so beautiful, but also so wasteful. I told him about it and he said it didn’t matter; that there would always be the song, no matter where it came from, as long as there were roads and travellers. Cars are incidental, he said.
  
  I think I believe him.

  • 7:13 am
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