Blind Curves

As the season for road-tripping approaches...

I couldn’t have been more than four or five and just beginning to read when I first became aware of a few beloved and mysterious souls who had gone missing from the world. Wherever our little family went, journeying along another of America’s ‘Blue Highways’ in our VW Beetle or later, our 1963 Volkswagon Camper we continually passed signs alerting us to the plight of these mysterious, missing persons and asking for our help.

‘Watch For Falling Rock’ one sign read, appearing again and again whenever we were driving into some steep-walled canyon or toward a mountain pass.

Who’s Falling Rock?, I’d wonder, picturing some brave young warrior in buckskins from a bedtime storybook who had somehow lost his way back home.

I can’t recall which of my parents started me and my sisters down this winding, mythical road, trying to focus our bored, road-weary imaginations on the meanings of those boldly printed words. I was just beginning to be able to recognize and hence, ‘read,’ such portal signs, which may have helped imbue them with a larger, more mythical story.

It might have been my biologist father who continually encouraged us to try to identify the birds in the trees and perched on power lines, and barb-wire fences by noting their passing and hastily glimpsed silhouettes. (Many simply ended up being classified as ‘Mugwumps’ by default, their mug on one side of the fence and their wump on the other, but over time my sisters and I got better and better at calling out the names of real birds and getting them right, a practice which can, as it turns out, stick with you for an entire lifetime).

If it wasn’t Dad then it had to have been, ‘just happy to be going somewhere on an adventure’ Mom, who, in those days made us delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and carrot sticks, and pimento-cheese celery sticks wrapped in wax paper, and who, after finally convincing Dad to stop for a bathroom break just moments before we couldn’t hold it any longer, regularly empowered us then by giving us each a quarter or two to spend in some local dime store or drug store along the way, encouraging us to pick out a new coloring book and maybe a shared box of crayons to keep ourselves busy as all those miles blurred past.

Whichever parent deserves the origin story credit, this playful utilization of road signs was definitely leveraged by both of them to involve my sisters and me in travel-aware, ‘look outside the car’ ways, in much the same way a game of 'Slug Bug' or 'I Spy With My Little Eye' requires that you keep looking actively out the window in order to score points, earn attaboys and playfully slug your older sister in the arm.

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Turns out that years before those first, slapstick episodes of Gilligan’s Island began playing out on our black and white television set, before I ever sat spellbound and giggling at their ridiculous, castaway antics, I was already acquainted with some earlier variation of that oft repeated, and definitely sexist query, ‘Ginger or Mary Anne?’ But instead of television actresses, my boy-mind was contemplating road signs: Soft Shoulders or Dangerous Curves? Both inspired visions that had wormed their way into my imagination and each competed for that very same set of conjectured preferences and loyalties…

The entrance to Parowan Gap, a classic example of a wind gap, an unusual geological landform marking where an ancient river has cut a 600-foot-deep notch through the Red Hills. Crazy-cool petroglyphs ahead.

I imagined ‘Soft Shoulders’ as a kind and nurturing young maiden who’d gone missing, not unlike Gilligan’s, Mary Anne. Soft Shoulders didn’t seem at all threatening to a five year old boy. But what was one to make of ‘Dangerous Curves?’ She definitely sounded naughty. More like Ginger. And danger was written right into her name, after all. I hoped Dad knew enough to slow down if we ever actually came upon her walking along the highway but definitely not stop!

Imagine my delight then as the stories and intrigues of ‘Falling Rock,’ ‘Soft Shoulders’, and ‘Dangerous Curves’ reanimated within my imagination a few years back, during my travels over thirty-five hundred miles of mostly ‘blue’ highways, when I drove from Seattle down to Southern California and back to spend time with my dad for what, it turned out would be the very last time.

And even better, a completely new, ‘gone missing’ character appeared along this meandering journey, asking that same old kid in me to imagine her story, as well. So now I’m slightly obsessed with piecing together the backstory for this newest, roadside, imaginary friend.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce you to ‘Blind Curves?’

I encourage you to join me in considering her plight, as well as the plight of those from whom she too has gone missing… And I respectfully ask that if you do see her, please approach slowly, speak softly and please, please, please let her family know that she's ok.

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A playful bit of existential tomfoolery as seen on a back road in Oregon.