From the air, from the map, it looks like a straight line.  Maybe a dog-leg or two, but for 220 miles it is nearly straight.  From the map it looks conspicuous only because it is that straight line bisecting a rectangular state.  Mapmakers, they got this far west, see, and they lost interest in complex shapes.  The first settlers were military and agriculture.  The military was allowed to define many of the borders.  Have you ever seen a thing designed by the military?  A thing designed by the military tends to have zero decoration.  No wasted space, empty of emotion, no empty decoration.  Purposeful and devoid of elegance.  To get from point A to point B you lay down your ruler and draw a straight goddamn line across the desert floor with your God's hand, and damn if someone doesn't make it reality.  That's real power, defining those maps.  Making the roads.  Creating the future.

Marking the escape routes.  That specific benign magic.  So special for such a bland master, too special for so administrative a function.  No more romance in maps when you get out west, all those straight lines.  No imagination.

From thirty thousand feet, the road is a straight line.  You can't see any features, can't see the detail.  When you do get to ground, you don't get much more.  Flat, tan and hot.  Featureless, sort of.  Some mountains off in the distance to the east and west.  Some clouds, sure.  Big fluffy things, white against that whitehot blue, that deep stupid blue that loses the eye.  If you grow up with that, you start to feel pinned to the ground by it.  You always feel it, up there, that beauty, and every night is the same sunset too complex for paint or photo to capture.  Too pretty to be real.  If you grow up with that, you lose interest in the amazing size of it.  You get lost only in the tight fit of you and Them, you and The World, and your focus narrows.  Sunsets too beautiful to describe, full moon skies too amazing to define, you lose hope in that.  You're such a small stupid ugly nothing in such a large vast beauty, growing up under a carpet of diamonds on black velvet for a night sky, growing up in the last of the America everyone seems to remember.  You don't deserve that beauty.

From the ground the road sits, a passive straight line disappearing on the horizon.  Dark gray, cooked by the sun, the shoulders of it filled with the dandruff of sixty years of passing traffic.  Scorch marks every now and again from cars gone up in flames, overheating and burning down in a mess of coiled steel and burned rubber.  The mile markers, the carpet of broken glass...if you're on foot, you see the scrub ugly of oil-coated vegetation, the rusty barbed wire defining the edge of the easement, the barest edge of civilization.  On foot, that concrete path is forbidding and huge.  No-one stays on foot for long.  They find a ride or they die.  Towns along the way settled by desperation, settled where the animals dropped and the men could go no further.  Towns created on graves, villages of necessity.

That road is the way out.  The Only Way.  Ugly and straight and hot and deadly, it's the Way Out.  It's the thing you dreamed of every single day at school, staring at onion fields out the window, bored with the droning lessons of a Pilgrim society, a colonial England that didn't ever exist in your America.  Staring out the window, bored with too-self-involved blond bombshells and too-boring math classes, all too aware of what limitations existed for you.  Staring into the graffiti-proof desktops, denied even that tiniest of permanence, you dreamed of an Exit.  The Way Out. Maybe it was because of the direction the road pointed, north and straight, guiding like a steel ruler, a prophet's path out of a dusty hot landscape.  Maybe it was the way that, from any high point, you could still see the road as a notch on the horizon, maybe a hundred miles out, still there, still leaving you, a mirage.  Leading you.  Guidance from every angle.

If you grew up with little more direction than "shut up and do your work," little more direction than being told what you would not amount to, if you grew up in an era of sure and sudden death 14 minutes from launch, you grew up knowing that this road would take you away.  It contained more direction than you'd been given.  It was built into your bones, written as clear as the map on your wall, the road highlighted in bright yellow against the pale tan and green.  Your official USGS map of the state, tacked to the wall and annotated. You and a friend, thirteen years old, you'd mapped a road trip, your escape plan, you'd planned every stop, not a dime or a license between you.  Thirteen hundred miles, you'd mapped it.  Thirteen hundred miles from home to who cares where, as long as it wasn't home.  Sixteen years old, that map still hung on the wall, those stops still marked, your friend with a different crowd now, but the route still there, faded neon yellow line on tan.  Every step planned for years.

So when that day finally dawned, and all your things were packed, and all your life fit into the back of such a small car, and when you hit the gas and you left, goddammit you left for the last time driving by Joel's house and for the last time driving by the Tomlin farm and for the last time hunting your heart for your feelings as your roads, your life, your entire cradle of existence disappeared in the rearview, when you finally got on that road, you hated it.

Hated that road.  That escape.  That requirement to leave.  You couldn't stay, not after so many years promising to leave.

That straight shot north, so plain and so much less than.  Your little car purring up and down through the small features on such a featureless landscape, those little hills taking on so much meaning.  Everything suddenly the Last Of, and so little, mean, meager.  Your eyes searching, desperate for meaning in that final drive.  The Last Time You'll See It All.  Oh God, you wanted it.  You so wanted it to mean something.  The ache for meaning.  Your eyes hurt for meaning.  For something profound to feel as those places you loved to hate and hated to love dropped away in the rearview.

Gone, you can't have that moment.  Gone, you can't go home again.  You can't.  Maybe that's for the best, maybe.  Those stupid places, those stupid people.  You try to feel that triumph.  You escaped.

When you turn off the road and take the next big line on the map, an anonymous interchange 225 miles from home, landscape shifting to high desert and low prairie, the endless flat of the Texas panhandle burning away the memory of your blue and gray mountains, you finally see what you wanted to see for so long.

That escape.  That something different.  So anticlimactic.  So routine.  Just another day for the road.

And your heart breaks.  Your heart breaks, tectonic.  Deep and permanent.  Shoves a whole new geography through your soul as you realize, maybe you finally realize: escape isn't always the right way to escape.  That road wasn't magic.  And you can never go home.