The Long Road

There is a road with no outlets, no cross streets, no place to turn around that stretches from Calhoun, West Virginia to Red Hills, North Dakota. There are no gas stations or towns or even cellphone reception. Just mile after grueling mile of worn pavement and trees. About a hundred and fifty miles in, the road begins to line itself with old cars long abandoned, having run out of gas years ago with no pickup to come and get them. When the cars die, when there's no where else to go, families start walking, taking with them only what they can carry. The fashion clothes from the blue vinyl interiors and weapons from windshield wipers, hubcaps, and shards of broken window to hunt for food as they walk. Children are born. Old ones die. The road gives and the road takes. They say those who reach the end arrive with new eyes, eyes of the warrior and the hunter, eyes of the way, the path long forgotten by man. Many who survive the trip turn around and return down the beaten asphalt path, back to the wilderness and the trees and the savage life they have come to accept as real where they walk by the sun and feed from the plants and never ate meat they did not know, dried and turned to jerky on the old blacktop, for such is the way of the road.

- Originally mailed to J. Womack in Brooklyn, New York