I do some of my best thinking when I drive. This afternoon, the highway from Columbus to Cincinnati (71S, for almost 90 straight, uneventful miles), left me remembering.
Many years ago, I had a conversation with a very complicated girl. She described an idea that has haunted me. I’m not even sure how much of what I now remember was part of her original idea, and how much I’ve edited and revised it, added to it and changed it, through the intervening years as I’ve turned the project over and over in my mind. The idea was, though, most certainly hers, and I would not take credit for it. I have to say, though, there have been several times over the past decade when I’ve seriously considered taking up the project and actually trying to see it through. I suspect someone has done something roughly in line with what she described, but I’ve never seen it. Then again, I’ve never looked. I doubt the complicated girl ever ran with it. Her complications tended to leave many of her incredible ideas unrealized.
Anyway, driving down the highway today, I saw the wreckage of many an unfortunate critter, and it had me considering again. I think I was in undergrad when we had the conversation. She described to me that someday, she was going to take a long roadtrip, and photograph all of the roadkill she came across. I know, it sounds at first blush like some self-indulgent morbid project for a goth-clad alienated art student. But I think there’s something there. She didn’t go into any real detail, but I’ve thought about it over and over, and have often imagined what the show would feel like. The idea of a wall of photographs of destroyed animals. The emotional impact. Some would likely be little more than crimson or black stains on the asphault, already almost lost to fleeting memory. Others would wear their suffering. Ever since she mentioned, in a sentence or two, what she had imagined, I’ve found myself noticing the nameless victims in the road. I’ve thought of all the tortured metaphors one could tease out of it – a holocaust of Gaia, bled out on the highways scarring the world. Other days, I’ve presented it to myself as something more personal and anthropomorphized, imagining a family of disney-esque gophers or racoons waiting for dad to come home, never knowing he’s hopelessly trying to drag his broken, no-longer-adoreable body to the shoulder, just to die on something softer than the interstate. Today I didn’t imagine any backstory at all. Just the power of the images. I don’t even know what they would do to me. I might fall to my knees, overwhelmed by the unresolveable tragedy of so much death and suffering. Or I might just feel cold and empty, being finally convinced of the absurdity of optimism. Or maybe there would be beauty there, behind all the carnage, beneath the immediate emotive wretch, some subtle and almost incommunicable whisper, a truth that must be felt to be known, and even then elusive.
I decided today that I’ll never undertake that project. Taking pictures of roadkill would change me in ways I don’t want to explore. I’m certain of that, now.
