Roads vs. Road Trips

A asked me if I wanted anything he could bring back from Indy this weekend and my only response was "Life. Bring back life." "That's impossible," he replied because the moment one turns off I-69, it withers away. Sometimes I feel like I live off the Convicts' Road or the Exile's Road Ian Frazier writes about below. I am always searching for that "happy ending" and this weekend it remains only in the photographs I am printing from this summer. I am dreaming of another road trip as this holiday weekend nears its half way point and I am laying low waiting for what lies on the horizon next weekend... Chicago.

"In America, we love roads. To be 'on the road' is to be happy and alive and free. Whatever lonesomeness the road implies is also a blankness that soon will be filled with possibility. A road leading to the horizon almost always signifies a hopeful vista for Americans. 'Riding off into the sunset' has always been our happy ending. But I could find no happy-ending vista here, only the opposite.... Longing and melancholy seemed to have worked themselves into the very soil; the old road and the land around it seemed downcast, as if they'd had their feelings hurt by how much the people passing by did not want to be here." Ian Frazier From Part I: Travels in Siberia


Len Jenshel's Death Valley, 1990