From the Highway

From the highway they all looked the same, every city the same as the last, each small town no different from the one forty miles before, and John Churchill had seen enough of them to know their inevitable pattern by heart. First in the cities came the convenient stores and fast food joints, clustered around the off ramps like sandbars building on a long sunken reef, thrown out from the island of the city, breakers to snare the truckers on their runs and the lonely travellers on their never ending road and the vacationing van’s full of cramped and crying kids. Between these pockets of gas and greasy food the highway would return to its more provincial character, and run once more through a mile of dark hills or open fields, depending on what part of the country you were in, before reaching the next little pocket of civilization. After these furthest breakers on the cities outermost limbs, as he moved closer to the city’s torso, John knew the spaces between the exit ramps would begin to fill with car lots and cheap hotels, in case any of the travellers needed more rest than a drive through meal could provide, or happened to have enough change in the dashboard to want to pick up a new car on their way through town. It was an odd combination, and one that John, for all his years passing in and out of the same city in all its incarnations scattered across the wide open Plains and Mississippi Valley hills and Midwestern cornfields, had never fully understood.
If he was passing through an older, one of those that had planted itself firmly in the ground before the bureaucrats and planners and schemers had gotten a hold of her, John would pass by the auto dealers and rotting motels and follow his highway next through the neighbourhoods and apartment complexes where the residents tried battled hard to find sleep against the whiff of smoke and diesel and the wheels that hummed through the night. If it was a newer city, one of those artificially moulded brainchild’s of forward thinkers who felt their college degrees gave them right to deny their city anything so unseemly as organic growth, the highway would instead curve out and around, carry him in a massive semicircle about the city over railroad tracks or across a river, and drop him off neatly on the other side.
From the window of the convenient store they all looked the same, every truck the same as the last, each little car no different from the one forty seconds ago. First in the morning came the commuters in their pickups and sedans, plodding puffy eyed into work from the country towns and suburbs, factory boys and white collar desk holders and schoolmarms all making that morning migration to the Big City, enduring throngs of others on the same mission as themselves, all fighting their way to the great watering hole on the middle. After the dawn herds came the businessmen too important for early mornings and the younger kids not important enough to be missed, making their way lazily to the coffee machines and wishing they had just slept in today. When the last of the morning stragglers had left and before the early lunch-goers could come, I would pick up the bags of crushed chips, sweep the crumbs off the floor, then switch out the sausage rolls and doughnuts for hot dogs and cookies before cleaning the coffee machine and checking the soda fountain to be sure the syrup was full before the commuters came back in to compliment the morning caffeine coursing through their veins with a bit of noontime sugar. It was during these in-between hours that I had the time to think about the people I had seen, the faces that passed so fleetingly through our glass doors. On most days there wasn’t much to be thought of them, they all looked the same. Some, most even, I recognised as the same faces of the morning before. On occasion I would pick a new face from the crowd, but they were just the same as the others, tired faces going through the motions of another day. Very rarely though I saw a different sort, they were instantly recognisable, this other breed. They were the real travellers, men born to live on the road. In their eyes I could see a light that was missing in the eyes of the everyday comers. It was a dim light, a bored one, but a light nonetheless. Unlike the Usual Crowd, who never saw anything beyond their snacks and coins, the travellers took everything in, at a glance they swallowed the whole store, examining it all in a moment. And when they paid they didn’t look at their watches or hurry off forgetting their change, but they gave you a look like a far away hawk catching glimpse of a mouse in a field below, taking it in under its gaze for a second before flying on. It wasn’t a hungry look, not even really an interest. Just an acute awareness, a feeling that they knew everything about you, had seen you a hundred times before in a hundred other stores at a hundred other cash registers and where of no more interest to them than a mouse does to a hawk who has already had his fill of woodland creatures for the day. But even this distant awareness was better than not being seen at all, and I knew that I would rather be one of them, the road weary travellers, than one of the rest any day.