Thomas Erickson
June 2024; August 2024
The sky arches overhead in a dome, light blue at the apex, shading down into an ashen blue as it reaches the ground. Traces of smoke have drifted south from wildfires in Canada. Ahead, the road curves, cutting slantwise across the low rolling hills.
The car vibrates. The road unspools below me. Seams in the asphalt beat out a soft rhythm. The landscape ahead divides and streams by me, the nearby trees parsing the early morning light into an irregular cadence. Car and sky are fixed; the world flows.
The ancient navigators who traveled the south Pacific in their outrigger canoes experienced the world this way. Their canoes were motionless, a stable center, and the ocean and its islands moved past them. Though the islands were far beyond the horizon, they could feel their presence in the patterns of the waves, and in the clouds that floated above them.
I am on a road trip. I have a roll to nibble as I set out. A sandwich for lunch tucked beneath the front seat. A water bottle in the cupholder. My iPhone, on its mount, displays my route. I am no navigator, not so in tune with the patterns of the world that I always know where I am. But the patterns of the world fascinate me; I am trying to learn them.
I have a feeling. Could it be elation? It is quiet, joyful, light, quick. If it were a sound it would be high and clear, perhaps like Tibetan singing bells, stirred into sound by the movement of a finger. Perhaps, as the road moves beneath me, it sets me ringing.
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