Letter from Utah: Part 10 of 12

This post is part 10 in a series of 12. You can download the entire essay by clicking here, or you can read the serial installments as they appear.

We’re driving north on interstate 15, just past Pintura, when the tie lines on a pick-up truck come loose, trailing furniture, mattresses and cardboard boxes all over the freeway. A flood of brake lights, cars scattering in every direction, broken table legs, strips of printed fabric sprawling out over the tarmac. The tenuous nature of driving—the agreement that I’ll stay on my side and you’ll stay on yours—is on my mind constantly as we’ve been moving across Utah in our tiny tin box. You are at the mercy of the reaction time of everyone else on the road—and an infinite number of other variables. This seems like a simple observation, but a dozen times in the last five days I’ve wondered, flirted with it even, what it might be like to turn the car just barely into the other lane, into the path of the oncoming semi. It’s not death I’m after, but the opposite—clearly, it’s madness. But I am curious about the speed, about the flipping the car might do, about the silence you could find in the noise. I manage to avoid the exploding junk, and after brief moment of white-knuckled panic, we’re out of it, it’s behind us, no harm done.

“Good job, honey,” Kip says.

My heart is racing. We are always one flashing instant from a new life.