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The Road to Nowhere for Max Ross
No one knew why he built a road over a mountain. It started close to home and wound through trees, past cliffs not visited in years, bound for the sea, but stopped before it got there, somewhere halfway down a hill.
They said, why build a road that goes nowhere? But it goes somewhere. It goes out to a rocky shelf that overlooks the steady unceasing breakers far below the traveler who moves while standing still.
Perhaps if it were finished— but it will never be finished. It runs toward not to the sea, an arc, a proposition in geometry, a brief infinity of points along a finite line.
It was for him a mode of recall, of the son who loved this place and years ago in madness or despair had killed himself. Walking the road, he saw what could not be left out in the many tellings.
It made a kind of solace. Yielding to rocks and shadows at the end of order, he waited for the long susurrus in the trees brushing across the land like half-formed memory or like the coming rain.
Jan Schreiber
©
2000; originally printed in Pivot. |
