A Drive to the Coast, Part 1

Part 1: Riding the 10 Fwy

by Armando Ortiz

The humming of the tires rolling on the concrete highway gave it an imagined sensation of floating on top of a free flowing river, riding a modern canoe, a tunnel like experience where the movie reel is no longer on the screen but inside an empty paper roll. It’s like rolling paper and peering through the little hole, imagining that what’s on the other side is miles and miles away. My drive down the highway is much more than riding an ancient Studebaker, where only one passenger fits, and the top speed is 35 miles an hour. Unlike the telescope though, things are moving past us, and I ride fast. Everything moving at a steady 75 miles per hour, the trajectory gets closer and closer, and the landscape streaks beyond the horizon to where the sun sinks. Unmovable is the setting sun, leaving the violet sky stained in amber orange. That’s the feeling one gets while driving down Interstate-10, on a late-fall afternoon. It's like riding on a chariot of fire, where the wheels have giant rubber tires and every rotation moves me three feet ahead.

In the past all roads lead to Rome, but nowadays, roads lead to borders, and circumvent the center. This highway, if I drive east, takes me to the Atlantic coast. Drive north from Los Angeles on the I-5 and you reach Bellingham, WA, the last big town before reaching the border of Canada. At historically unimaginable speeds, one can cross the whole sleeping steppes of flats, mountains and plains that exist on this North American geography. The wheels and speed at which I drive still make the humming sound with occasional surreal beeps, the center in sharp focus with endless white dashes that separate the lanes slightly hypnotize the mind. The rubber sticking and slipping from the concrete, and the heat radiating from the ground slightly makes the wheels stick on the ground for less than a billionth of a second. I look at my rear view mirror and side view mirrors to know where the cars are and to check if any car is behind me. I do this to make sure that if anything happens I surely will be able to limit the severity of any problems that might arise.

I turn on my iPod and listen to the most up to date electronic music and immediately I'm transported to a reality that has only existed inside the pages of the most contemporary books, static thumps with a center point that looks as if expanding. Shakespeare never took a ride on a Bentley, and neither did Whitman get to ride a little Toyota while bumping on hip hop tracks. Nope, this moment is singular to what others have lived. The moment, amazingly beautiful and tragically imperfect, yet the earth still circling, circling around the sun. It’s in the direction I am driving on and seems like it’s on an infinite pause, displaying the wondrous splendor while I step on the pedal and dare to race it to the edge. Nevertheless, when one sees things for what they are one sees that things are good, at least here. The weather in Los Angeles during this time is great, the sunsets are millennial, and the people along with the tourists are magical. Where else would I rather be, but here, where I am, riding towards the sunset, on the highway, with some good music blasting, all I need now is my Amazonian queen to guide me into the canyons.