Travels 8..............

Out past the end of the world, past the last broken iron and smashed concrete footprints of civilization. We went out into the impenetrable dark canopy of living wild and woven tree thickets and gravel dust chaos. Out past the confusion of living, past the always talking and always distracting…out into the simplicity of roaring engine that turns wheels and road to fire and melts rubber and thought together. Out into the single-mindedness of running. Paranoia. Fear. We heard the sirens everywhere and with each peep or squall of whining sound, we went deeper and deeper in the backlands. Around here this is how folks escape trouble…any kind of trouble…they ran hog wild into the backlands of hills and creeks and cousins. We run past the lights of town and back around again doubling up on ourselves.
“Fuck Mitchell, what did you do?” Doug’s voice is slight and being carried away by the blowing wind coming through the open window like a hurricane.
“I don’t know.”
“He fuckin’ set the lake on fire.” Jeff’s word came out flat and fell straight down towards the ground…no reverb…no going loft…the word did not float…they fell and died. The car still burning through the atmosphere like a piece of clattering space junk falling back to Earth with a spectacular crash in mind. Something felt like it was coming. We drove past the last the railroad crossing with working lights…now we were in the backwoods.
The house got less tidy. The cars parked in front got older or not at all. The sounds got quieter for a few minutes and then got louder again…but I different kind of loud. Loud out here is a special kind of loud…a loud tolerable…a loud a person can hear through. A loud made for human ears and to be enjoyed by human ears, believe me it was a sound that could soothe, soothe or shake...a shake a person down to their barest core but even that could be a soothing experience. There is magic in places like this...untamed untapped human magic. We drove even faster out here…because out here there are no laws…no laws at all…only madness prevailed out here and a person was only bound by the limits of their imagination.
The half rolled down window next to me rattled in the door and slipped a bit further down. An empty glass bottle rolled around my feet in the floorboard. I picked it up and tossed it out the window. It crashed on the road behind. I watched the tiny little bits of glass shoot up and down falling back down like shards of ice. The little bits caught the red and white light of the taillights and sparkled.
“I cannot believe you did that man.” Doug shook his head.
“It looked fuckin’ cool” Dan said as he watched the breaking glass with me. He turned back around and returned to reading his magazine.
“Yeah, It did look cool, but fuck we are going to get in some much shit.”
‘What? No, we are not. Don‘t be a fuckin‘ twat dude…nobody is going to know it was us” Dan’s voice had a higher pitch and northern lilt that the rest of us lacked.