I wrote this up back in the spring but it never got published anywhere. I'm surprised that intro still works. Enjoy.
To someone who has never left the halogen embrace of the
suburbs, it can be hard to explain just what driving through a rainy backwoods
night is like. Darker than dark, as if
the world is being unmade just outside the rim of your vision, as if you might
pass one bend and simply cease to be.
Any point of light becomes distracting, blinding, as if it were an
aggregate of all brightness that could be and manifests itself by sucking every
ounce of illumination out of the blackness, leaving the dark a vacuum. When you approach a city the lights play on
the clouds for miles, and you climb glacial hills and suddenly come upon it,
streetlights spread out below like an open pit mine, rows of stoplights leading
to Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, Lowes.
If you have ever driven through the emptying center of the country you
undoubtedly came upon other places like this, towns who decided to ditch
property values and substitute jobs instead, serving as the economic hub for
zipcodes in every direction. Sitting
flat upon the plain or in the foothills like a half-loved, half-feared
stepchild. And then you pass the
livestock exchange or final block of fast food restaurants and emerge back into
a landscape of in-ground concrete silos, rotted-out barns, great cowsheds with
shit and horror at their hearts.
Onrushing darkness filling the place light once was like a wind or
sudden sound.
