black chevrolet

I missed the exit and suddenly there was no more ground.  Brown pillars soared into the mist, carrying my narrow freeway up into the clouds.  The syncopated wail of electric guitars, in rhythm with the expansion joints, filled the ear pockets in the helmet as I flew along, white lines channeling me, railroading me ahead.  I had no clue where this was going. I was along for the ride, clenched to the handlebars searching desperately for a cross street, an exit to somewhere, someway to escape this madness carried in the current of cars and trucks.  No, please no, don't dump me into West L.A.!  Anything but west L.A.!  I'll take 10, I'll take Century, I'll take little surface streets I promise I'll never miss an exit again just don't leave me in West L.A.!  They say no one returns from there alive!

LAX, spread out for miles beneath me, whirled around slowly as the freeway climbed and arced through the sky.  The yin-yang symbol of Korean Air shone softly through the fog over the cargo building.  I can't be too far from something I know.

The exit for Sepulveda suddenly appeared from nowhere and I exhaled, relaxing on the throttle and clutch, humming down, gliding down from the heights to the ground again.  Normality resumes, taxis and Jettas and black clad Lincolns.  A 767 fills the sky, thundering into the air, trailing mist from the wings.

The freeway in the city is a funny thing.   It's like a river, it can carry you to strange places and you are only in control of where it takes you about half the time.  The other half is left to the vagaries of traffic and the vagaries of your own sense of direction and distance.  It may dump you anywhere and leave you stranded on any chevron island as you search for a way to escape your plight.  It ebbs and flows with the time of year and road construction, with the forces of bureaucratic physics.  It has sand bars and wicked snags, overhanging bridges and burnt-out exit lights.  It is covered in trash and graffiti, the scum of the earth take refuge in the concrete nooks of overpasses.  Unlike a river and unlike freeways in open country, it knows no peace and no beauty but only the ugly.  And the dark and hellish determination and intensity of drivers bent on their own destination, their own exit, their own speed and schedule.   Drivers like me.  I watch a handkerchief flop lazily along the centerline.  A pickup truck mashes it flat into the pavement and it lies there plastered as I race by.  No roadkill, not even the dignity of dead birds or tumbleweeds.  Just trash...styrofoam boxes....recycle(1)....ASK....