Archives for August 1992

Halos Over the Highway

I’m 10 miles outside of the Indianapolis beltway at a rest stop on Highway 70 East. One wouldn’t expect there to be much beauty or significance to look at from such a spot, yet the whole area has taken on a profound atmosphere.

I’m seated beneath a small beach tree on the edge of a large field of grass. Behind me and to my right are fields of corn, and the sky is full of isolated strato-cumulous clouds. Each cloud is unique, though for the most part my attention is not drawn to any one more than another.

But all the clouds as far as I can see have a common base — as if there were an invisible glass table hovering at about two-thousand feet, upon which they all rest.

So smooth and uniform is the cloud base, that traveling across the flattened highway feels like being trapped on the earth’s floor, and that if only I could go fast enough, maybe I’d be able to at least reach the surface of the sky and get some fresh air.

But when I stop and think for just a moment of the sheer magnitude of mass that moves East, West, North and South simultaneously across our highways, I know that there IS a way to the surface, and that machines and mechanics are not the way. No, the journey to the sky must be made one person at a time, and each by their own power from within.

Signed: A temporary land dweller.

Copyright (C), 1998, by Ashley Guberman