The Lost Cargo Highway

Phonebooks on the entrance ramp to I-240/Airways – Dec 22 2010

Things in the road. My heart aches when I see stray chairs on the side of the highway or papers spilling out on curbsides or brand new phone books with wind-turned pages lying limp on entrance ramps. Who will come back for them? I think.

Then I run them over.

I noticed a clump of clothes at an industrial intersection on Airways Blvd last Tuesday morning on my drive to work. There’s no telling why there’d be a pile of clothes in the middle of the street. Someone could have spilled a laundry basket out the back of a truck or maybe a scorned lover threw a suitcase out the window of a moving car or maybe someone was hosting a new kind of yard sale or game show where you can keep what you can grab while not getting run over. Either way – the owners had to keep moving – since no one had picked up the mess by the time I drove home that afternoon at 4:30. I determined at that time that it was probably women's clothing (or could have belonged to a gentleman with a preference for turquoise and fuchsia).

The strewn clothing was still there on Friday afternoon. It was very much still strewn and looking far dingier than before (surprisingly without any noticeable tire tracks). The owner of the bright clothes could have been at the Gulf by now, shopping for new hot pink t-shirts, finding a suitcase with a better latch.

This part of town is the dirty business part, where we not only do we air dirty laundry, we let it sit in a busy intersection for days and weeks, just daring someone to touch it, but mostly waiting for it to disintegrate, to get ground into the pavement until it becomes a bumpy part of the road like the rest of the past that has traveled before it.