It was a single, perfectly detached rear quarter of a deer that first welcomed me to Pennsylvania. It was sitting on the side of I-80, between the yellow shoulder line and the jersey barrier with nothing around it. Just hanging out on the shoulder like the highway equivalent of a morbid yet appropriate table setting. I had questions of course, how did it get there? Where... was the rest of it? As I drove on it stuck with me though. How many things we pass by on the roads, highways, and throughways over course of our travels that we see, yet go unseen?
Eyes on the road right? Hands at 10 and 2, during our commutes and our errands. Heads absently bobbing up, down, or side to side to music. Or sentence fragments muttered in half committed responses to whatever the discussion is between the talking heads on the radio. Our eyes are open. We’re alert, the partially finished coffee sitting in the cup holder makes sure of that. Yet the autopilot has been thoroughly engaged, our consciousness checking in 5 minute blocks, but ready to respond a quarter second’s notice. Not unlike the parent of a toddler who had moved to an adjacent room to fold laundry, listening for anything outside of the expected chaos. Unsupervised, yet not unsurveiled.
If you pay close attention, you can almost feel it happening. When you slip back into the drivers seat, and when you step away again. More interestingly, try to catch what things bring you back. Unexpected roadwork draws me in for a few moments, just long enough to figure out if I need to worry about being late to my destination or if I need to brave the back roads. I’ll snap back in if I start getting that strange intuition you get when you know someone is about to merge, not right now, but you can tell they are definitely thinking about it. The pilot in me refuses to leave again until some kind of resolution is reached; so I tend to either slow down to give them an abundance of room, or speed up and pass to either force the decision, or remove it entirely. I’m not sure what that inner pilot is doing in that other room, but I hope it isn’t folding laundry.
It isn’t always something grisly like that deer haunch. The other night on my way home from work it was a perfectly upright potted plant. Its generic home improvement store plastic base didn’t look too damaged. It was intact enough to consider its survival a small gesture of divine providence, even in its slightly injured state. Aside from the obvious questions of “How?” I thought about the others. Did it fall off the back of something? Was it deliberately placed there as some sort of high risk prize for the one daring enough to stop and pick it up? The concerns about its final outcome faded quickly though, as I had some more laundry to fold I guess.
The hats, caps, and odd sneaker every now and again might receive a momentary flare of awareness, but their explanations are too mundane. Too easily explained by an unexpectedly windy day with the top down, your shotgun riding navigator with a foot out the window with untied shoelaces. Then there’s the wild card sibling battle where the checkmate was always throwing something out the window at 75mph.
Mattresses and box springs I understand completely though, but don’t at the same time. They are a royal pain unless you have a pickup with a bed big enough or box truck. Securing it to the roof of the car? Bungees, rope, or winches, whatever you got, you hope you have enough of it to keep it stable. Behind the doors or through the windows, and how exactly do you tie it lengthwise? The joke though is even with your best amateur effort, you still run the risk of physics demanding sacrifice. But even if the wind snatches it off the roof of your car...why didn’t you go back and get it? If it was worth going through all that trouble, was a little road dust now the proverbial straw?
I once came across a couch. It was no longer white, but it looked like it was trying to remember. Weather and the highway’s own systems of entropy had clearly taken its toll. Terrible pun aside, I considered the couch as it faded from the rear-view. Was it a moving day casualty? How did it come to be discarded so far from home? It seemed serviceable enough, maybe it and its owners had shared memories enough that made this unceremonious goodbye easier. Who can say?
Driving is a happy pastime for me. Always has been. A moment away where I turn my inner monologue into a full conversation to the backdrop of whatever genres I happen to be into at the time. Continually alert, but with a solitary hand at noon. The pilot makes sure to pop its head in from time to time, before going back to folding socks.
-KC