Four hours east of El Paso, and already Los Angeles makes its mighty gravity felt.
It is midnight, and the I-10 is flooded with Californian Cars bearing
Californians westward, running with the rotation of the earth, back towards California.
The fault block mountains have a night vision glow of silver and black.
Silver cars, silver road, silver Californians in their casual clothes and immaculate silver cars with all-wheel drive,
side-impact airbags, silver snouted retrievers behind the pet-webbing that came
as part of the sport options package that is a mandatory for any active lifestyle that
includes opening a Pilates and yoga studio on Venice Beach.
The eighty-five mile-an-hour sand outside the driver's side window is silver, and it dusts
across The Great Ten like further silver night-vision pixels that are not pixles but
real, quartz and silica, as real as a thing that is three-quarters of the mass of the Earth's
crust can be.
Because the wind is blowing west towards California because the turning of
the earth is moving air masses and masses of silver cars under the
silver light of the Colorado desert where there is only rock and silver.
There is no stopping now.
There is only 89 cent gasoline burning under distant silver light in a car mass of California
cars that cannot stop until El Paso, four hours away, because there are no hotels, because
there is a bowl game, and because there are too many Californians,
and when you stretch us end-to-end in our cars with the cruise control on they form a ribbon
that reaches from El Paso to within four hours of the silver moon.