Reflections - cover2

A Journey not Measured in Miles - Rash
decision he must make – right or left. He did not have any place to go nor did he know where he was going. He turned right simply because it was
easier to turn the steering wheel in that direction.
His bright lights picked up the highway. The white stripe was a thread he could follow into the endless night. He thought of a line from a poem,
“The road was a ribbon of moonlight,” and of the dashing highwayman telling the lusty wench at the inn, “I shall be back with the yellow gold
before the morning light.” Ah, to have cut such a romantic figure, riding, riding, riding down a ribbon of moonlight! Then he laughed at himself, at
life, at the Devil, at God. Hell, he thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing – riding down a ribbon of moonlight, just like the poet’s highwayman!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
The car leapt forward, driving itself with some mechanistic instinct, following the long, slow curves and gradual hills. There was patchy fog now in
the low spots, but Rash neither slowed down nor dimmed his lights as he blasted through it. He enjoyed the sensation of being enveloped in the
warm car; he felt powerful, protected, in control.
˜
The trucker began to slow down. He knew the upcoming bridge. It was narrow and tonight the fog was thick. He felt the cattle shift, a he began to
brake. Something wasn’t quite right about the bridge. He sensed it at first, rather than saw it. Then he realized that the concrete railing on his
right was smashed. Big chunks of concrete lay on the shoulder, a few pieces on the road. As he eased across the bridge, his lights picked up
something dark and not very large on the road. He thought it was a dead animal, but as the rig passed over the object, he realized it was a single
boot standing upright, as if someone had carefully set it there.
Clearing the bridge, he found a spot on down the road where he could get far enough off on the shoulder to pull off the road completely. He left all
his lights on, took his flashlight out of the glove compartment, and walked back to the bridge. The night was damp and cold, and he shivered inside
his Levi jacket, but it was not so much from the cold as from the fear of what he was going to find. He was afraid to stand on the bridge and look
over the railing; an approaching car would not see him soon enough in the dense fog. He decided to walk along the bank of the creek.
The ancient creek had cut a deep pathway in the loose red soil. Most times the creek was barely a trickle, but heavy winter rains had swollen it to
an unusual depth. Even with that, it was still quite a ways from the top of the creek bank down to the level of the water, and the bank was steep and
muddy. If he stood upright, he ran the risk of slipping into the dark, cold water. In this land where water deep enough to swim in was an
infrequent gift, he, like many land-locked cowboys, had a healthy respect for deep water. He could not swim. So he sat down on the cold, slippery
bank and using rocks to brake himself, he scooted down close enough to the water so that his flashlight beam could pick up the dark water through
the fog. It looked like a bottomless pool of blackness. At first he saw nothing, but moving the beam in a slow arc, he saw newspapers floating, a
folded-up shirt with the laundry’s paper straps holding it together, then a silver-belly Stetson floated by like a small boat. Suddenly the beam
caught the flash of metal and he was looking at the undercarriage of a car. It looked like a big car, fairly new. The two front doors were open, and
on the driver’s side, he could barely see the outlines of a body, held just below the surface, part in and part out of the ar. One leg floated free – it
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