erosion

In the city where I was born, there is a highway that is notoriously dangerous. Now, for some reason there seem to be a lot of exaggerated rumors about the features of that city; that it’s the world’s hottest city, the most polluted, that it’s next to the most dangerous highway in the world. At least that’s how it was back when I was young. Nowadays you can just fact check everything you hear online, whether you stumble on the right information or not is up to you. But I didn’t care, nor do I care now, to check how true any of those statements are. It’s not that I take them at face value, but when you live in those conditions it starts to feel like they might be true, and as you grow older you start to wonder if maybe all those rumors are made so that people will be more careful. In the case of this highway, one only needs to look 100 or so feet down the edge of the road, down the cliffs, to find several cars and trucks completely overturned and smashed, and realize that, hey, even if it isn’t the most dangerous highway in the world, it might be pretty bad. Object of many ghost stories, it goes up into the desert mountains, has some absurd curves and extremely strong winds that can blow at unexpected times. It’s named la rumorosa, a name which it gets from the strong gusts of wind that blow through it in such a way that it sounds as if they were trying to speak. I introduced all of that to tell this short story. My father had a very unnerving habit of looking around while he was driving. As in, he’d look to the side of the road for 10 or so seconds at a time and ignore the road in front of him, just to take in the scenery. He was a big admirer of nature, something which I definitely inherited from him. But this habit of his always made me nervous when we went on road trips. As he was driving down la rumorosa one day, he was doing this gazing around that he always did, but I noticed that the look on his face was more serious than usual. There seemed to be some intent on his face other than to be amazed by landscape. He suddenly pulled off a side of the highway, towards the side that was closer to the edge of the mountains, and stopped the car. We got out and looked around for a bit. From here you could see the vast, empty desert beyond and below. And immediately below us, some 50 feet down some cars and trucks, who knows how long they’d been there, who knows the fate of the people who were in them. As I stared down he said he needed to pee and began crossing the road, into the mountains. He told me to stay but I followed anyway. We wandered for a bit. That’s what it seemed like to me, but it became apparent that he was searching for something. Through some bushes he cut a trail, and after some time I got the feeling that he didn’t know the way. But eventually he found his destination, in his expression, much elation. A clearing with a massive boulder. Carved into the rock some forty years ago were five sets of initials, hard to see around all the erosion it had endured. It felt for a second like I was the weathering that had eroded something that he clearly had lost down the way. Where had he been all this time and we did he get in exchange? Two hundred miles away, a family that didn’t welcome him, two ungrateful sons, the destruction of his own body. A gale broke and we heard a clear whispering in the wind, in a language that doesn’t exist anymore. We drove the rest of the way home in silence, listening to the now angry howling of the wind. Two siblings, separately, dedicate themselves now to the transcribing of those sounds.

03/15/20