Semaphores Beside the Road

Posted on November 12, 2005 in Driving

I fled a karaoke night before someone put my name on the singing roster. Seeing that I was near the Garden Grove Freeway, I got on it and took it to the 55. I got off at Chapman, which is my egress out of the suburbs and into Santiago Canyon.

Along a dark section where the cell phones don’t work, I saw two cars pulled over on the opposite side of the road. A shadow used a pair of flashlights to semaphore. I made a u-turn, slid back to the cluster of vehicles and people, and rolled down the passenger side window to talk to the first two figure.

“Do you need a cell phone?” I asked.

They were just kids, looking for Blackwater Canyon Road. Kids who looked younger than a teenager should look, almost more like a class of sixth graders in my eyes. But they had licenses to drive, so they couldn’t be kids. They were near-men and near-women out to find Blackwater Canyon Road for their own reasons.

“It’s that way,” one of the boys said, pointing in the direction I’d come from originally.

“No,” I said. “It’s that way.” I used my thumbs to gesture over my shoulders.

I told one driver how to get there and then the other. The red eyes of a sedan blinked at me through my rearview mirror, so I repeated the directions one last time and pulled ahead of them to let the other car pass. Then I hauled around, returning to my first direction, the direction of home.

Quietly, I laughed to myself. “A hairy old man in the gloom of the night. What will they think of me? That I am a slasher out of one of those horror films?” The bushes on either side of the road glowed in my headlights. Santa Anas had stripped them of their foilage, the green as well as the yellow and the red. I continued my run through the darkness until I found the corner of Ridgeline and climbed the hill to my refuge from all that which is dark and cold, my home.

* * * * *

There are things you can see clearly in the darkness that you cannot in the light. Connections that are invisible to you when the sun drops its rays over a landscape sear your eye under the moon. I did not understand until recently how Santiago Road bends to my left as I approach it from the East. On the map I have inscribed across the cortex, I have it running in a straight line.

It’s like how zealots want their religion: a straight line that runs across all country with no regard for the actual terrain. I suppose the reason I missed the turns before is because I was always right on top of the terrain, going with its wishes rather than fighting it to make my own path.

A straight line may be whatever route we need to take to get There.