Last
Friday night was a full moon, and I was the craziest one on Route 8, determined
to make it to San Diego by midnight. Cary and I were driving to a soccer
tournament; my husband had to work on Saturday night. I’d passed up eating in
El Centro because MacDonald’s was the best thing there, so I was powering on
cheese sticks and Amp Zero. We’d already passed the sand dunes in the darkness; the dunes, formed from river silt, are non-reflective even with the moon on
high beam. The sand is teeming with beetles, weevils and
wasps but we saw none of this before the highway narrowed.
After
miles at a sluggish 65 mph, the flow of traffic shot up to 80 as the road rose and funneled into single lanes too treacherous and remote for the local
highway patrol to risk. It seemed that Darwin’s law would prevail. The edges were studded
with reflectors placed where the road tended to slide off into
nothingness. As we climbed, glowing rectangles appeared in sequence like
luminaries at the Desert Botanical Gardens, our headlights a speedy candle lighter running in front of
us.
At the same time,
in the periphery of the headlights, pinhole meteors burst as instantaneous
streaks shooting towards us: all those winged insects drawn to the light and glowing as if we were
in hyper-drive. As the road
curved upward through invisible hillsides, a monstrous wind turbine rose up to our
right. We were at the height of its midsection, and its Martin arms were flailing in a wind created only by the turbulence from speeding motorists. After forty-five minutes in the mountains the lights slowed to
red-yellow-green, and we crawled our way to the motel.
On
Sunday night, we saw the same trajectories, the same momentary spews of light as amateur fishermen cast their phosphorescent floating lures (light sticks!) again and again from the pier down to the surface like
fireworks. In the morning, behind me as I packed the car, was a pink, crepuscular dawn, the light again streaking down. All I had was my cell phone!
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