A few evenings ago I was driving home down Highway 290, six lanes of constant traffic flow that skip across North-West Houston like a stream of pebbles across a pond, and I happened to be in the lane directly next to a huge, eighteen-wheel flat-bed truck. The sun was setting on the horizon that, here in Texas, always seems so very distant. As we rode along together, every now and then the white and chrome cab would suddenly flare into brilliance as the red rays gushed through his side windows. Thin slivers of fractured sunset would spill out like showers of sparks across his hood.
I was struck by just how beautiful that truck was. I'm tempted to use words like 'majestic,' or 'striking,' in place of making a reference to something so feminine as beauty, but the truth is that it was beautiful. Like a force of nature, an elemental thing, this truck. More like watching a winter storm at sea than being near a menacing steel beast, it was the nature of the truck's motion that made it so compelling. It was as though the sheer will to move had coalesced, grown flesh of metal and glass and rubber and was charging past me in flame-limned determination.
I wondered for how much longer trucks like that would be seen on the roads, and if they should pass, what future generations would make of them. Would they see them as a passing, inefficient fancy? Foul smelling and wasteful and best buried with the other fossil-fuel monstrosities of the twentieth century? Perhaps they will seem more like peculiar oddities, like leech cups and trepanning screws and the paraphernalia of a less enlightened age. Or perhaps, for some, they, and the people who drive them, will take on the same rose-tinted sheen of romanticism that turned illiterate, foul-smelling cowhands into modern symbols of freedom and individuality.
All I know is that for a just a minute, maybe two, that truck and that sunset met in a strange asphalt alchemy and became for me an expression of some oddly human spirit of determination.
The great wheel turns; what is strange becomes commonplace, and what was commonplace becomes strange. The truck was headed somewhere, and wherever that somewhere is, only the truck knew.