Expecting Forest Fires

road trip observations, photos, and phenomenological experiences.

Driving long distances makes you both aware of your environment, and, paradoxically, unaware of it. Trees become things of staggering beauty when you choose to notice them, then blend into shallow signifiers of “the road” while your attention drifts elsewhere. Road trips are an exercise in meaning, and the creation of meaning, in an extraordinarily personal way.

Driving from California to Washington recently, there were ample opportunities to become enthralled by the sights and sounds of the road, and bored by them. A bridge over the Sacramento River we crossed on the first day kept my mind occupied for the entirety of the 3-day trip: what environment does the river create for Sacramento? Like Shakespeare’s crossing of two roads in Stratford-upon-Avon, I enjoyed imagining what stories and people and creatures and music and art and life might spring from that river, a place I had never before encountered. The many other sights of the road failed to stick in my imagination, even the night we passed through a controlled burn area of an Oregon forest, smoke filling the air and reducing speed and visibility to a hazy crawl. The imagination sparked by anonymous space, the sense of a possible world that is created in the mind, is a powerful force.

Driving, Sophia and I listened to albums to pass the time. Time on a road trip is thick with internal worlds, even as the external world presents itself to you, almost screaming, look! There is so much of me to see! But I spent most of the first hours of our trip listening to, and thinking about, The National. She put on High Violet, one of the few albums downloaded to my phone, usually employed during flights, also crucial in those areas of the coast which lack cell service. Listening again to this album I had heard countless times before, I imagined it as a soundtrack to the road, the grand scope of the songs matching the endless road before us. This is The National, though, so any sense of grandeur is quickly chased by a looming melancholy, the melancholy of daily sameness.

The morose, Morrissey-like turns of Matt Berninger’s lyrics can at once establish a world for the listener to inhabit alongside Berninger (“Cuz I’m evil,” “It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders,” “I’m on a bloodbuzz”), and in the next line remind the listener that there is only one Berninger (“I set a fire in a blackberry field”). Suggestion, imagination, and exacting detail. These elements live side by side in a National song, and in much the same way, the road allows for an exploration of the wonderfully abstract alongside the poetically specific. A forest fire can become routine, expected and anticipated by signs on the road reading “Controlled Burn,” and warnings about wildfires on GPS, while a bridge over a river can be a site of intense imagination. I’m reminded now, as I was during the drive, of “Conversation 16,” on High Violet. A fascinating song with highly suggestive, abstract lyrics on the chorus and bridge. I wonder what others make of these lyrics.

A guest appearance by John Slattery, truly a great music video.

While I write this, sitting between Sophia as she types on her computer and the two cats who have made her bedroom theirs too, it appears quite clearly to me why introverted personalities prefer the comfort of the familiar to the thrill of the unknown. I like rollercoasters, I try new foods, there are events I will gladly exit the house for; but the pleasure and joy in comfort that I feel, in a space where there is equal opportunity to talk, write, read, or be silent in thought, is far too good to pass up.

There is no music on, but there is sound. A rich soundtrack of the whirring ceiling fan, keys softly clacking on our keypads, cats scratching themselves, and a city full of cars and conversations muffled by the closed window. On the road life is fickle, always passing by and never permanent. While its permanence that I crave, it is partly because I venture out that I recognize the comfort in consistent space. The road is a beautiful, passing-by place, somewhere where there is no sense of place, and yet, all the place in the world. In the mind, or in the external world. Whichever you choose to perceive.