A REPORT FROM DRIVER #3
That night, New Year=s
Night, first night of the true new millennium, traffic
had thinned to a milky stream. That kind of slack time
on I-25 out of the city is unusual. Rush hour has become
an empty phrase when the Valley Highway teems with
throbbing vehicles even through the wee hours. But for
once, traffic wasn=t
all that dense. A brume hung over Denver, an enervated
conclusion to the holidays. January and another thousand
years lay ahead.
I was glad to be going home
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home not meaning the city of my childhood anymore. In
most of the important ways, that city is gone. It=s
as if some overpopulated amalgam of LA and Dallas was
plunked in front of a mountain backdrop. I look forward
now to each stage of leaving Denver behind: losing the
numbered street exits, the three lane highway dropping
to two, the gradual thinning of the look-alike houses
that crowd the vanished farms all the way to Fort
Collins. The traffic drops dramatically after that, with
fewer and fewer cars every mile. And then, the world
opens up and I head over the border into Wyoming.
When I was seventeen and packing for
college, I painted the Denver skyline on the lid of my
trunk. I used bold colors
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deep blues for the mountains, black and silver for the
skyscrapers
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to remind me of the way I felt each morning, seeing
downtown in its bowl backed by Long=s
Peak, sparking with vigor. Twenty years later, the city
sags under its own weight like the disintegrating
muscles in my stepfather=s
face, the people full of the hysteria gathering in my
mother=s
eyes.
I passed the 84th street exit.
A couple more exits and I would leave the northern
suburbs behind. A Blazer in front of me in the middle
lane suddenly swerved out to the right, chassis rocking
wildly on the high wheels. Revealing a car stopped dead
in the highway. My foot hit the brake
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hard. |
