Roadside Trees Quotes

There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us.

And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

The first place that I can well remember, was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master's house, which stood by the roadside;

I lean back against a roadside tree. A tree. Another fucking tree. They’re everywhere, these soaring reminders.

Now mind is clear as a cloudless sky. Time then to make a home in wilderness. What have I done but wander with my eyes in the trees? So I will build: wife, family, and seek for neighbors. Or I perish of lonesomeness or want of food or lightning or the bear (must tame the hart and wear the bear). And maybe make an image of my wandering, a little image—shrine by the roadside to signify to traveler that I live here in the wilderness awake and at home.

MOTHER – By Ted Kooser Mid April already, and the wild plums bloom at the roadside, a lacy white against the exuberant, jubilant green of new grass and the dusty, fading black of burned-out ditches. No leaves, not yet, only the delicate, star-petaled blossoms, sweet with their timeless perfume. You have been gone a month today and have missed three rains and one nightlong watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar from six to eight while fat spring clouds went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured, a storm that walked on legs of lightning, dragging its shaggy belly over the fields. The meadowlarks are back, and the finches are turning from green to gold. Those same two geese have come to the pond again this year, honking in over the trees and splashing down. They never nest, but stay a week or two then leave. The peonies are up, the red sprouts, burning in circles like birthday candles, for this is the month of my birth, as you know, the best month to be born in, thanks to you, everything ready to burst with living. There will be no more new flannel nightshirts sewn on your old black Singer, no birthday card addressed in a shaky but businesslike hand. You asked me if I would be sad when it happened and I am sad. But the iris I moved from your house now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner, as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that. Were it not for the way you taught me to look at the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees.

There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast. "The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways. "Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller. "I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state. "You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.

I still dream in pictures and color, always the world of my childhood. I see the purple Judas trees at Easter lighting up the roadsides and terraces of the town. Ochre cliffs made of cinnamon powder. Autumn clouds rolling along the ground of the hills, and the patchwork of wet oak leaves on the grass. The shape of a rose petal. And my parents' faces, which will never grow any older. "But it is strange how scent brings it all back too. I only have to smell certain aromas, and I am back in a certain place with a certain feeling." The comforting past smelled of heliotrope and cherry and sweet almond biscuits: close-up smells, flowers you had to put your nose to as the sight faded from your eyes. The scents of that childhood past had already begun to slip away: Maman's apron with blotches of game stew; linen pressed with faded lavender; the sheep in the barn. The present, or what had so very recently been the present, was orange blossom infused with hope.

There were no fences at all by the roadside now, and the land was rough and untilled. Toward evening they came to a great forest, where the trees grew so big and close together that their branches met over the road of yellow brick. It was almost dark under the trees, for the branches shut out the daylight; but the travelers did not stop, and went on into the forest.

As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree.

This morning from a dewy motorway I saw the new camp for the internees: A bomb had left a crater of fresh clay In the roadside, and over in the trees Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade. There was that white mist you get on a low ground And it was deja-vu, some film made Of Stalag 17, a bad dream with no sound. Is there a life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and sup: we hug our little destiny again. -Whatever You Say Say Nothing

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed. We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by. The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass. My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation---in the shadow of a dim delight. The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs. At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with thy smile. How I had feared that the path was long and wearisome, and the struggle to reach thee was hard!

Gnarled olive trees covered the hills with their dusky foliage, fruit hung golden in the orchard, and great scarlet anemones fringed the roadside, while beyond green slopes and craggy heights, the Maritime Alps rose sharp and white against the blue Italian sky.

Poem in October" It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water praying and call of seagull and rook And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall Myself to set foot That second In the still sleeping town and set forth. My birthday began with the water- Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name Above the farms and the white horses And I rose In rainy autumn And walked abroad in a shower of all my days. High tide and the heron dived when I took the road Over the border And the gates Of the town closed as the town awoke. A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder, Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly Come in the morning where I wandered and listened To the rain wringing Wind blow cold In the wood faraway under me. Pale rain over the dwindling harbour And over the sea wet church the size of a snail With its horns through mist and the castle Brown as owls But all the gardens Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud. There could I marvel My birthday Away but the weather turned around. It turned away from the blithe country And down the other air and the blue altered sky Streamed again a wonder of summer With apples Pears and red currants And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables Of sun light And the legends of the green chapels And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds. And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart's truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year's turning.

One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Here where all the trees grow in rows; the palms stand stiffly by the roadsides, and in the groves the orange trees line in military rows, and endlessly bear fruit. Beautiful, yes; there is always beauty in order, in rows of growing things! But it is the beauty of captivity.

I’ve never seen a soul here. No one shows themselves in the dismal wet fields, patchworked into sections by wire fences. No one toils behind the tufted vestiges of hedgerow. Few birds mark the sky beside the desultory spectre of a crow. As for trees, only spindly copses sprout on higher ground, shorn or shattered into piteous last stands; the woods have been whittled skeletal behind the wire of internment camps, to make room for more empty fields. And cement barns. Telegraph poles. Litter in the roadside ditches. Burst animals on tarmac, smeared, further compressed. Denatured land. Denuded. Scrub grubbed out, scraped away. Ugly and too neat. Empty. Industrial even. Blasted. Nowhere for anything to nest, take root, hide. Green but made desolate by the impact of the nearest settlement’s conquest. These are factory-farmed lowlands orbiting a city. A ring of ice encircling a blackened planet.

Almost on crossing the Ohio line it seemed to me that people were more open and more outgoing. The waitress in a roadside stand said good morning before I had a chance to, discussed breakfast as though she liked the idea, spoke with enthusiasm about the weather, sometimes even offered some information about herself without my delving. Strangers talked freely to one another without caution. I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside - the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled. It seemed to me that the earth was generous and outgoing here in the heartland, and perhaps the people took a cue from it.

In the summer of 1914, he had headed to France in the company of his only son, Alistair. They were driving at high speed through woodland in Northern France when Alistair lost control of the wheel. The car spun into a roadside tree and flipped upside down. Alistair was flung from the vehicle and landed on his head. Cumming was trapped by his leg in a tangle of smouldering metal. ‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident, ‘and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car in order to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might, he could not free his smashed leg.’ If he was to have any hope of reaching his son, there was only one thing to do. He reached for his pocket knife and hacked away at his mangled limb ‘until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to the son and spread a coat over him.’ Nine hours later, Cumming was found lying unconscious next to his son’s dead body. His recovery was as remarkable as his survival. He was back at his desk within a month, brushing aside any outer shows of mourning for his son. Cumming had the ramrod emotional backbone that so typified the gentlemen of his social class and era. Just a few months after his accident, one of his operatives visited him at his offices on the top floor of Whitehall Court. Cumming, who had not yet received his artificial leg, was inching his substantial frame down six flights of stairs: ‘two sticks, and backside, edging its way down one step at a time.’ Little wonder that his friends described him as ‘obstinate as a mule.

For me, what a single firefly can do is this: it can light a memory I thought was long lost in roadsides overrun with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod, a peach pie cooling in the window of a distant house. It might make me feel like I’m traveling again to a gathering of loved ones dining seaside on a Greek island, listening to cicada song and a light wind rustling the mimosa trees. A single firefly might be the spark that sends us back to our grandmother’s backyard to listen for whip-poor-wills; the spark that sends us back to splashing in an ice-cold creek bed, with our jeans rolled up to our knees, until we shudder and gasp, our toes fully wrinkled. In that spark is a slowdown and tenderness. Listen: Boom. Can you hear that? The cassowary is trying to tell us something. Boom. Did you see that? A single firefly is, too. Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn- a shift and a swing and a switch- toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous planet. Boom. Boom. You might think of a heartbeat- your own. A child’s. Someone else’s. Or some thing’s heart. And in that slowdown, you might think it’s a kind of love. And you’d be right.

and walking until their thoughts burned out one by one like dying stars and they fell into a fugue state wherein all that mattered or had ever existed were these trees, this road, the counterpoint rhythms of human footsteps and horses’ hooves, moonlight turning to darkness and then the summer morning, caravans rippling like apparitions in the heat, and now the Symphony was scattered here and there by the roadside in a state of semi-

I have many wonderful memories of this days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand. I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving—to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing—light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves.

I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about. I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.

Crow became very jealous of a Raven, because the latter was regarded by men as a bird of omen which foretold the future, and was accordingly held in great respect by them. She was very anxious to get the same sort of reputation herself; and, one day, seeing some travellers approaching, she flew on to a branch of a tree at the roadside and cawed as loud as she could. The travellers were in some dismay at the sound, for they feared it might be a bad omen; till one of them, spying the Crow, said to his companions, “It’s all right, my friends, we can go on without fear, for it’s only a crow and that means nothing.” Those who pretend to be something they are not only make themselves ridiculous.

Sometimes I have such a longing to do landscape, just as I crave a long walk to refresh myself; and in all nature, for instance in trees, I see expression and soul, so to speak. A row of pollard willows sometimes resembles a procession of almshouse men. Young corn has something inexpressibly pure and tender about it, which awakens the same emotion as the expression of a sleeping baby, for instance. The trodden grass at the roadside looks tired and dusty like the people of the slums. A few days ago, when it had been snowing, I saw a group of Savoy cabbages standing frozen and benumbed, and it reminded me of a group of women in their thin petticoats and old shawls which I had seen standing in a little hot water-and-coal shop early in the morning.

The sap mounts in the stems, the buds burst with faint sound, and the darkness is full of the noises of growth. There is night in the room, and the moon. There is life in the room. It creaks in the furniture, the table cracks and the wardrobe also. Many years ago some one felled these and split them, planed them and worked them into things of utility, into chairs and beds - but each springtime, in the darkness of the sap, it stirs and reverberates in them again; they waken, they stretch themselves, they are mere objects of use no longer, no longer chairs for a purpose; once again they have part in a the streaming and flowing outside. The boards under my feet creak and move of themselves, the wood of the window still cracks under my hands, and in front of the door even the splintered, decaying trunk of a lime tree by the roadside is thrusting out fat brown buds. In a few weeks it too will have little silken green leaves, as surely s the wide-spreading branches of the plane tree overshadowing it.

Is that what we do? We pitch our tents, do our little clown shows, and then take off up the road to the next town ahead? Leaving our science-fictional debris on the blasted dirt to poison the minds of future generations, like the alien litter in STALKER and ROADSIDE PICNIC. Flying cars rusting out like Saturn Five rockets propped up as roadkill talismans at Kennedy, leaking toxins into the soil. Jetpacks oozing fuel from cracks in their tanks and poisoning the grass. Three-ring moonbases crumbling in the solar wind. Birdshit on the time machines. Big fat rats scavenging broken packs of food capsules, Best Before Date of 1971. A Westinghouse Robot Smoking Companion, vintage of 1931, slumped up against a tree, tin fingers still twitching for a cigarette. Vines growing through a busted cyberspace deck. The shreds of inflatable furniture designed for the space hospitals of 1955. Lizards perched atop a weather control cannon. Atomic batteries mouldering inside the grips of laser pistols abandoned in the weeds.

We entered the grove, and a few yards in, the trees opened to another clearing. In the center was a Sunbeam bread truck, the tires missing, mounted on cinder blocks. It had to have been from the 50s. Little Miss Sunbeam, blond curls framing her face, looking down from the side of the truck with one blue eye. The other missing, replaced by a large spot of rust. Innocent and poised, forever taking a bite out of a piece of buttered white bread. The slogan above her head, Reach for Sunbeam! ENERGY-PACKED! Under Miss Sunbeam the truck was lined and stacked head high with crosses of all sizes, the artificial flowers attached to them faded by the sun. I realized they were roadside crosses, many I recognized that were placed at accident scenes along Death Road and disappeared shortly after. An eighteen-foot four-by-four utility pole and meter leaned dangerously inward toward the truck, anchored by nothing but mud and rocks after the rain. A deep cast iron pot sat a few feet in front of the truck surrounded by ashes, bits of charred wood and odd shaped tree stumps.

Ancestors To tell the truth, we should not exist. We, not any collective plural, just you and me. Let us use our imaginations to visualize for a moment the circumstances and conditions of the life of our parents, then our grandparents, then great-grandparents, thus further and further back. Even if among them all there happened to be wealthy individuals or men of privilege, the stench and filth in which they lived, as that then was the rule, would have astonished us who use showers and toilets. What was even more certain was among them the presence of starvelings, for whom a piece of dry bread in pre-harvest time meant happiness. Our ancestors died like flies from epidemics, from starvation, from wars, though children swarmed, for every twelve of them only one or two survived. And what strange tribes, what ugly snouts behinds you and me, what bloody rites in honor of gods carved in the trunk of a linden tree! Back to those who are stalking through the undergrowth of a murky primeval forest with chipped stones for their only weapons, in order to split the skulls of their enemies. It would seem as if we had only parents and that's all, but those other pre-pre-predecessors exist, and with them their afflictions, manias, mental illnesses, syphilis, tuberculosis, and whatnot, and how do you know they do not continue on in you? And what was the probability that among the children of your great-great-grandparents the one survived who would beget your ancestor? And what the probability that this would repeat itself in the next generation? Altogether, a very slim chance that we would be born in these skins, as these, not other, individuals, in whom the genes met those of the devil knows what whores and oafs. The very fact that our species survived and even multiplied beyond measure is astonishing, for it had much against it, and the primeval forest full of animals stronger than humans may serve till now as a metaphor for man's precarious situation - let us add viruses, bacteria, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, but also his own works, atomic weapons and the pollution of nature. Our species should have disappeared a long time ago, and it is still alive, incredibly resistant. That you and I happen to be part of it should be enough to give us pause for meditation.

Or maybe just his desire to escape the darkness, which in some way reminded him of his childhood and adolescence. At some point in between childhood and adolescence, he thought, he had dreamed of this landscape or one like it, less dark, less desertlike. He was in a bus with his mother and one of his mother’s sisters and they were taking a short trip, from New York to a town near New York. He was next to the window and the view never changed, just buildings and highways, until suddenly they were in the country. At that exact moment, or maybe earlier, the sun had begun to set and he watched the trees, a small wood, though in his eyes it looked bigger. And then he thought he saw a man walking along the edge of the little wood. In great strides, as if he didn’t want night to overtake him. He wondered who the man was. The only way he could tell it was a man and not a shadow was because he wore a shirt and swung his arms as he walked. The man’s loneliness was so great, Fate remembered, that he wanted to look away and cling to his mother, but instead he kept his eyes open until the bus was out of the woods, and buildings, factories, and warehouses once again lined the sides of the road. The valley he was crossing was lonelier now, and darker. He saw himself striding along the roadside. He shivered. Then he remembered the urn holding his mother’s ashes and the neighbor’s cup that he hadn’t returned, the coffee infinitely cold now, and his mother’s videotapes that no one would ever watch again. He thought about stopping the car and waiting until the sun came up.

Near my house, groups of men were digging up the chikhawo roots of banana trees so they could boil them like cassava. Some dug up other roots and tubers, even the grass from the roadside, and milled them into flour. Others resorted to eating the seeds from government starter packs, scrubbing off the pink and green insecticide that kept off the weevils. But it was impossible to get all the poison off, and many suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, which only made them weaker. Plus, having now eaten their seeds, they had nothing left to plant.

I’m Captain Florida, the state history pimp Gatherin’ more data than a DEA blimp West Palm, Tampa Bay, Miami-Dade Cruisin’ the coasts till Johnny Vegas gets laid Developer ho’s, and the politician bitches Smackin’ ’em down, while I’m takin’ lots of pictures Hurricanes, sinkholes, natural disaster ’Scuse me while I kick back, with my View-Master (S:) I’m Captain Florida, obscure facts are all legit (C:) I’m Coleman, the sidekick, with a big bong hit (S:) I’m Captain Florida, staying literate (C:) Coleman sees a book and says, “Fuck that shit” Ain’t never been caught, slippin’ nooses down the Keys Got more buoyancy than Elián González Knockin’ off the parasites, and takin’ all their moola Recruiting my apostles for the Church of Don Shula I’m an old-school gangster with a psycho ex-wife Molly Packin’ Glocks, a shotgun and my 7-Eleven coffee Trippin’ the theme parks, the malls, the time-shares Bustin’ my rhymes through all the red-tide scares (S:) I’m the surge in the storms, don’t believe the hype (C:) I’m his stoned number two, where’d I put my hash pipe? (S:) Florida, no appointments and a tank of gas (C:) Tequila, no employment and a bag of grass Think you’ve seen it all? I beg to differ Mosquitoes like bats and a peg-leg stripper The scammers, the schemers, the real estate liars Birthday-party clowns in a meth-lab fire But dig us, don’t diss us, pay a visit, don’t be late And statistics always lie, so ignore the murder rate Beaches, palm trees and golfing is our curse Our residents won’t bite, but a few will shoot first Everglades, orange groves, alligators, Buffett Scarface, Hemingway, an Andrew Jackson to suck it Solarcaine, Rogaine, eight balls of cocaine See the hall of fame for the criminally insane Artifacts, folklore, roadside attractions Crackers, Haitians, Cuban-exile factions The early-bird specials, drivin’ like molasses Condo-meeting fistfights in cataract glasses (S:) I’m the native tourist, with the rants that can’t be beat (C:) Serge, I think I put my shoes on the wrong feet (S:) A stack of old postcards in another dingy room (C:) A cold Bud forty and a magic mushroom Can’t stop, turnpike, keep ridin’ like the wind Gotta make a detour for a souvenir pin But if you like to litter, you’re just liable to get hurt Do ya like the MAC-10 under my tropical shirt? I just keep meeting jerks, I’m a human land-filler But it’s totally unfair, this term “serial killer” The police never rest, always breakin’ in my pad But sunshine is my bling, and I’m hangin’ like a chad (S:) Serge has got to roll and drop the mike on this rap . . . (C:) Coleman’s climbin’ in the tub, to take a little nap . . . (S:) . . . Disappearin’ in the swamp—and goin’ tangent, tangent, tangent . . . (C:) He’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (Fade-out) (S:) I’m goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (C:) Fuck goin’ platinum, he’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (S:) . . . Wikipedia all up and down your ass . . . (C:) Wikity-Wikity-Wikity . . .

went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: “Prepare to Meet Thy God—Amos 4:12” and “He who endures to the end shall be saved—Mark 13:13” and “REPENT”—Mark 6:12.” Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez. Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississippi, facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the transpontine town of Vidalia. It was my first glimpse of the river on this trip. Though the Mississippi is not the busy thoroughfare it once was, it is impossible for an American to see this great, muddy, slow-moving stream and not be moved, as an Indian is by the Ganges, a Chinese by the Yangtze, an Egyptian by the Nile, an African by the Zambezi, a New Guinean by the Sepik, a Brazilian by the Amazon, an English person by the Thames, a Quebecois by the St. Lawrence, or any citizen by a stream flowing past his feet. I mention these rivers because I’ve seen them myself, and written about them, but as an alien, a romantic voyeur. A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation.

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.

Spring. The green dance, from the smallest roadside plant in a vertical upsurge, to trees bursting in leaf, swaying to morning skies woven in rainbows of returning birds, from the mystical white transformation of ice and snow in bays to the miracle and movement of water. I am stillness, I am dance; I am death, I am life. Know this for what you are. Everything moves.

Oh, the dead past that survives in me and that has never been anywhere but in me! The flowers from the garden of the little country house that never existed except in me! The pine grove, orchards and vegetable plots of the farm that was only a dream of mine! My imaginary excursions, my outings in a countryside that never existed! The trees along the roadside, the pathways, the stones, the rural folk passing by – all of this, which was never more than a dream, is recorded in my memory, where it hurts, and I, who spent so many hours dreaming these things, now spend hours remembering having dreamed them, and it’s a genuine nostalgia that I feel, an actual past that I mourn, a reallife corpse that I stare at, lying there solemnly in its coffin.

The consequences were horrific; Ireland was transformed into a post-apocalyptic landscape. Destitute men lined the roads in their rags, sleeping in crude shelters dug into roadside ditches. People ate dogs, rats, and tree bark. Reports of cannibalism were frequent and perhaps accurate. Entire families died in their homes and were eaten by feral pets.

Finches flashed in the tops of ancient elm trees and rooks lifted on gleaming wings, while the verdant landscape rippled sweetly all around her. Sheep bleated peacefully, cow parsley billowed at the roadside and celandines shone poetically. She really ought to be drinking it in; it was like benign nature was spreading its arms for her

I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.

Wheel was seventeen miles north on a potholed county road, and it looked to Joe as if a strong wind might blow it away. There was a dilapidated gas station and convenience store—closed—on the entrance into town, and the only other business that seemed to be in operation was the Whispering Pines Motel, which was tucked away in a copse of trees on the top of a wooded rise a half-mile away from the town itself. It was easy to find because there were three brightly lit small signs on the sides of the road saying WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: YOUR ROADSIDE OASIS, WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: HOME AWAY FROM HOME, and WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: LIKE STAYING AT GRANDMA’S. Joe was curious to meet Grandma.

town of Medicine Wheel was seventeen miles north on a potholed county road, and it looked to Joe as if a strong wind might blow it away. There was a dilapidated gas station and convenience store—closed—on the entrance into town, and the only other business that seemed to be in operation was the Whispering Pines Motel, which was tucked away in a copse of trees on the top of a wooded rise a half-mile away from the town itself. It was easy to find because there were three brightly lit small signs on the sides of the road saying WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: YOUR ROADSIDE OASIS, WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: HOME AWAY FROM HOME, and WHISPERING PINES MOTEL: LIKE STAYING AT GRANDMA’S. Joe was curious to meet Grandma.

I think this is the closest thing to being a live ghost. Disappearing into roadside trash and trees that somehow figure out how to grow in California’s eternal drought. Existing as the most salient and invisible thing on the road, both sinking into the dark and so terribly misplaced.

The householder by digging tanks, by planting trees on the roadsides, by establishing rest-houses for men and animals, by making roads and building bridges, goes towards the same goal as the greatest Yogi.

A few moments into the ride, I saw Reynaldo's figure down the road, walking erectly, holding something. Seeing him there, amid the banana trees and huts and roadside stands with petrol in Coke bottles, I felt a distinct envy: he belonged here, in this place. He strode with a correctness and security I knew I would never feel in this country. Which was fine. Displacement, it was a valid way to live.

The trees at Tse Bonito Park were yellow, the roadsides were streaked with the purple of the last surviving October asters, and overhead the sky was the dark, blank blue.

A few large olive trees struggled for life near the roadside, their twisted roots seeming to explore the hard, caked soil in search of a little water.

The car slipped merrily onward, past fields and beneath the branches of the enoki trees set in rows along the roadside.

I have many wonderful memories of those days we had together. It would make me happy to know that at least a few of your memories of me are good ones. I wonder if you ever think about sitting under that oak tree, with the cicadas buzzing, and, at night, the crickets. Or how the ice used to cover the blueberry bushes in the winter, giving them that dreamy look. Or how we used to sell the pies for your mother at the roadside stand. I still think of you whenever I see blueberries.

we are born into this world on the tailcoats of a scream. born into gritted teeth and a shock of red across the pristine. born into a solemn hush. are you evil? you, who tore into this world on a steed of crimson… are you a monster? we are born as angels, toothless, a mouth a gurgling brook. and as we grow, so do our wings, until we are high enough to see that our church is no more than a small forest and the altar a tree. are you a monster, angel with fangs? all teeth, thick with teeth, you can’t even close your mouth anymore. it rains and it’s like drowning. corn husk skin and we’re born again. into a time of being tied down, to a person, to a bed. a time of clipped wings. of holy cries out to a void. your wildness a convenience store in the desert, pale pink, dusty, arid. your wildness staring longingly at the screaming horizon and flicking another cigarette butt into the dirt, a lone oscillating fan its only company. we’re born into this concrete world, where sanctuary is to be alone or to pretend to like it. this world of broken bottles instead of leaf crunch. roadside motels proclaiming vacancies. inside and out. that pluck your heartstrings. a new church, a fresh sin. the altar now a white railing against a muted matte pink wall. you lean against it, hips jutted to the side. some of the eighties still lingers. you see a man in a leather jacket kissing a girl’s neck purple. he looks up. teeth are everywhere. hundreds of glistening teeth. you turn away. your wings shush against an old telephone booth, door forced closed. you’re calling your mother to say you’re sorry for hurting her, but when she answers you hang up.

We tramped over, and as we stepped from the thick trees, we all stopped and stared. Then Corey raced forward, arms raised. “It’s a road. Oh my God. A road!” He dropped to his knees by the roadside. “Oww.” Daniel helped him back to his feet. “The knee is good,” I said. “But the knee is not completely healed. Be careful.” “It’s a road,” Corey said, pointing. “A dirt road,” Hayley muttered. “So? We’ve been slogging through the forest for two days. What do you want? A six-lane highway?” “That’d be nice.” “Yeah, until you raced out, screaming for help, and got mowed down by a logging truck.” He walked into the middle and turned, waving his arms. “It’s a road!” I patted his back. “It’s a lovely road. Now, which way do we go?” Corey looked one way, the brown ribbon extending into emptiness. He looked the other way, saw the same thing and his shoulders slumped. “Damn.

We tramped over, and as we stepped from the thick trees, we all stopped and stared. Then Corey raced forward, arms raised. “It’s a road. Oh my God. A road!” He dropped to his knees by the roadside. “Oww.” Daniel helped him back to his feet. “The knee is good,” I said. “But the knee is not completely healed. Be careful.” “It’s a road,” Corey said, pointing. “A dirt road,” Hayley muttered.

I have a number of such wells in mind. In county Longford, not far from the town of Granard, a spring bubbles in some rough ground a few yards from the roadside. Climb the old wire fence where it ties into a tree, walk in a north-westerly direction, and look out for some unexpected ferns and water fronds; the big green blades will catch your eye.