Where The Streets Have No Name

Night doesn’t fall on Montana, it rises. A ribbon of black scrolls out to the vanishing point ahead and behind, a river of asphalt with a number for a name and no speed limit. The map guys call it Highway 89. The windows are down, the moon-roof open, and the little brown Subaru missile is southbound and down, somewhere in the badlands between Livingston and Yellowstone. Subie we call ‘er. Not the most imaginative name, but she’s everything she needs to be and nothing she doesn’t.

Outside, the sage and scrub whistle past as we approach Subie’s terminal velocity. Rocky cathedral spires stand to the sky in inky silhouettes, and the terrain could have been lifted straight off of the Valles Marineris of Mars. The wind should be howling inside the cabin as the speedometer surges north of 90, but like Yeager before us we find a supernal calm in the silent eye of some warped slipstream effect. The sense of momentum is all but lost as the moment stretches out to a kind of equilibrium between our supersonic speeds and the vast gulf of blacktop separating us from our destination, wherever that might be. For a moment, it’s just as easy to believe that we are inert, as the road moves under us instead.

The russet haired neo-bohemian at the wheel has one of my Camel Wides dangling at the corner of her mouth like she was born with it there. If an alpine meadow full of wildflowers got up one day and decided to go on walkabout as a 20 year old girl with a thousand year old soul, it couldn’t have done better. Who knows, maybe it did? A hummingbird couldn’t keep up with this one. Don’t let the freckles fool you.

A scrim of cloud scuds across the night sky, obscuring a huge Reaping Moon that hangs way too close to the earth. Big Sky Country they call it. Only because it’s so much closer to the roof of the world. Between the million billion icy stars and the diffused, preternatural glow of the pregnant moon, the world is awash in a luminescence that delineates clean, sharp pools of shadow on the lee side of every shrub, hill, and arroyo we pass. The air smells like ozone and sage, like lightning.

In the back seat the blonde with the bottomless coffee eyes ashes her smoke out the moon roof, since she always sits in the middle and never behind either of us. It feels like a den we’re sharing instead of a box strapped to an internal combustion rocket. She smokes like she knows she shouldn’t, but can’t remember why. Rebelling against what, we know not. If you failed to see past the surface demure and Patrician’s elegance, you might miss the reserve of steel that could take your best shot and then some. And under that, something fathomless.

It’s a highway with no one on it, a treasure just to look upon it. The road-workers have done a bang up job with those lines; they whip past like dots and dashes of an Enigma-encrypted message too arcane to be deciphered by the likes of us. There’s no one ahead, no one behind. You could believe that this barrenness existed as a life support system for us alone.

I’m in the passenger seat, and Jah is your copilot, Bob’s yer uncle. I got them going with those Camel Wides, because I’m the kind of guy who thinks that what you smoke says something about you. I actually believe that. At this point they have no idea what a loser I am. I’ve come to be in this moment with them like a man escaping the burnt ruins of a life. Penniless, dumped, and escaping the humiliation of a move home to Mom and Dad’s by “adventuring” in Yellowstone Park. As a toilet scrubber. How an Irish Git like me ever wound up breathing the rarified air of their company is anyone’s guess, but there it is. I'm smart enough not to pull on that thread.

Right now I’m trying on a new personality like other people try on clothes. Forged in a crucible of geekdom, steeped in the ways of every loser guy who the girls just want to be friends with, I’m in a death match struggle with a chrysalis that will either end in transformation or be the coffin they burry me in. It’s like the first time you try to rock a new look—a cowboy hat, leather jacket, or bangs—everyone needs to give permission. To “buy in," so to speak. The first one to say “who do you think you’re fooling?” destroys the delicate alchemy of change. But here on this nameless road there is no one who knows that I’ve come here to fool everyone into believing in Me-2.0. The laid back Sage, quick with a joke and a light of your smoke. I’ve even changed my name so I remember to forget the guy no one here knows. On Highway 89 everyone has zero history. We’re just making it up as we go, and there's no one to contradict who we say we are. No one ahead. No one behind.

Here we are, each of us, the velocity of our young lives beginning to match Subie’s as we stab forward into a frontier we have no maps to. But there’s gas in the tank, smokes in hand and the music is high. All is right with the world. The casual serendipity of some midnight DJ’s choosing rides an AM station’s errant signal, arcing off the stratosphere to find us out here in the hinterlands. There’s nothing more elemental to the American Soul than the road. And somehow, by the design of some benevolent force, the arc of our three lives has intersected in this place where the streets have no name and the speed is as unlimited as we feel. This trinity. This trifecta whose whole is so much more than the mere sum of its parts.

The sound is faint at first, the subsonic hum of something that seems to arise from the union of rubber and asphalt. It resonates, it swells. Rising, it distinguishes itself as an otherworldly chord struck on an harmonic bellows, whose presage harkens us. It draws out, calling to the numinous in each of us, like a church organ. Things are in motion now. Each of us knows it at once and together. We say nothing, either unable to, or unwilling for fear of disrupting this delicate lattice forming like a web around us. The tensile jangle of strings rises as the organ before it. Faintly, straining to be heard, but unwilling to rush. Like a bundle of high tension wires, drawn taut and singing, elegant in their simplicity. It really seems like this chorus could be coming from the steep walls of igneous rock jutting up on either side, resounding, instead of from Subie’s speakers.

The moonglow that lights up the infinite road stretched out in front of us swells in sympathetic response. That silver lining we’re promised in every cloud flows across the face of the moon like an aqueous veil of quicksilver. The arpeggios are gathering speed now, growing in timbre and power. Driving like a horse at gallop. Elegiac, but brimming with the promise of every horizon. The crepe tissue of clouds is moving faster now, flowing like a river in the sky, the curtain being drawn. At the crescendo of the driving base, the cascading staccato-delayed chords, that moment when all the promises are kept and delivered on, the clouds part like the Red Sea and the moon bursts onto our road, our path, like noonday.

Sometimes, the timing is all the miracle you need.

            I want to run, I want to hide

I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside

I want to reach out and touch the flame

Where the streets have no name

I want to feel sunlight on my face

I see the dustcloud disappear without a trace

I want to take shelter from the poisoned rain

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We’re still building and burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there, I go there with you

It’s all I can do

Cities in flood, and our love turns to rust

We’re beaten, blown by the wind

Trampled  in dust

I show you a place, high on a desert plane

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

Where the streets have no name

We’re still building and burning down love

Burning down love

And when I go there, I go there with you

It’s all I can do

Our love turns to rust

We’re beaten and blown by the wind

Blown by the wind

And I see our love

See our love turn to rust

Blown by the wind, blown by the wind

When I go there, I go there with you

It’s all I can do.

“Holy shit”, says Red, the youngest of us, the freest. The first to give voice to the thing that can have no name. The tacit approval, the permission given and received to be what we are about. The road, the Martian terrain, and every inch of our Den lit up and cast in specific relief. Crisp, black shadows, soft as a lullaby, trailing behind like they were trying to keep up. That soft, ineffable light like the underside of an angel’s wing, brilliant white like a blank page, waiting to be writ upon.

So we did.

That was eighteen years ago. But that eternal, evanescent moment still lives. It’s taken up residence in me, like a haunting. I fooled enough people into believing the new version of me. Not least of which myself. And that moment, those friends, that world, is the beginning. The page isn’t blank anymore. The biographies are being written, the histories of choices both tragic and triumphant. But I’ve never forgotten the moment in time when everything was possible. We weren’t looking back or daydreaming the future. One moment of serendipity’s perfection and we were in it. Not lagging behind or surging ahead. In it. And we knew it. We plunged on ahead, living for a time in a world where the normal rules did not apply.

From which I have never truly emerged.