Andrew Mayden

“A car is a contained world with ever-shifting vistas.”

by Karen Palmer

I took a road trip recently, a 2,500-mile roundtrip drive between Los Angeles and Grand Lake, Colorado, where I was due to spend a week teaching at Lighthouse Writers’ annual retreat.

Yet my own writing was stuck. I’d estranged myself from a promising novel-in-progress. Since the 2024 election, the news had become relentless, daily cruelties laid out so matter-of-factly that creativity seemed frivolous, even pointless. My concentration was shot; the simple pleasure of stringing sentences into interesting paragraphs felt beyond me.

Traveling east from LA, I drove into the sunrise. I didn’t listen to the news, as I usually did. The silence was a relief. After turning north onto I-15, I stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin. I brought my notebook inside, but I didn’t open it. Instead, I watched a toddler gleefully spill first his soda, then his mom’s. I envied his mastery of the environment. Back on the road, the sun climbed. The desert spread all around. I relaxed a little more. A couple of hours in (only twelve more to go!) I approached Barstow. Ahead, two nondescript bridges spanned the highway.

The bridges reminded me of a remedy for insomnia a therapist had once suggested: Imagine you are flying over a river, arms out, Superman-style. You follow the river’s twists and turns while a bridge grows ever closer. At the last second you swoop down and pass beneath it, abandoning consciousness on the way.

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