…a woman who writes poetry as prose, a San Francisco and NYC urbanite who in one of her essays tells of discovering country music, writes of solitary drives across the West, of the aloneness of the road and of wandering.

Reading Solnit brought to mind my own many solitary drives, kept company by an open window and a dark road, by midnight country music on the radio, by a sense of both leaving and arriving. I drove towards an unknown and unimagined future, distinguishable as an emotion only now, far into the future looking into the past.

The first time I was about 18…the family car, Victoria, Texas to Laplace, Louisiana, on to Nashvillle and then to Cairo, Illinois before turning South. Later, as an undergrad at College Station, I’d at times quit studying late at night and drive backroads, miles and miles in the dark. I never knew why.

Texas to Alberta, Alberta to Madison. Madison to Alberta and back more than once while in grad school. And from Madison I made more than one nonstop trip to Texas…the highway at night, an open window, coffee and Snickers bars, and WBAP out of Dallas. Brother Bill Mack sent out songs for truckers and for people like me, driving through the dark at 3 AM.

Amherst to Houston, Houston to Jacksonville, Texas to California. Maybe it’s best I can’t remember them all. The weightlessness of those open roads belied the the weight of the future that lay at their end. It might be too much to bear.