Old Flames I: The Highway Season

There was a season of highways once. Twas the rainiest, dirtiest, funniest days of our time; peculiar indeed. We cackled lightning and belly-laughed thunderstorms. What god left us this wasteland of roads, with one utopia after another, always one more oasis dying in the breeze of the distance, we'll never know.

We wailed guitars out in the fields that gave us tornadoes. We wept in the great plains of a dying breath country. We bested our kin in the stretch of a foot race. We swam in rivers, we smoked on porches and we laughed everywhere. We had diaries of dreams and journals of jokes. We watched fireflies spend the summer with us, we sipped liquor with mint snd we heard the world spin its slow, heavy grind.

There were rocking chairs, long sunsets and enough fireworks to keep the great conversation of this nation burning. What was this country becoming? We all wondered that Fourth of July, looking up at the black disappearing in the ghostly parade of the sky. But all we came up with was more backyard dinner parties.

So, when the country settled, what did we have? We had the shoeboxes of letters, the albums of photos and the etched memories of lost causes and lofty effects.

But it all started with a car speeding down the spine of this country. It all started with a joke taken too seriously that ended up having a killer punchline. It all started when someone loved something more than something else.

And it gave us all a long history of escape artists.