two hundred five

NEVADA STATE HIGHWAY 50 KNOWN AS THE LONELIEST HIGHWAY

This was it for 400 plus miles through Nevada. The traffic was very light, about one car or truck every half hour to as much as an hour and a half. Once or twice it was even longer. Talk about feeling isolated. 

The treeless landscape allowed a strong wind to blow with an eerie silence. My ears lost that background tone we all have from the noise of the daily rat race. After a few days of quiet I begin to truly hear. I could hear trucks and cars from five or more miles away. 

They would first give a hint they were real as small moving speck on the horizon, then they grew large enough to be real. Soon I could determine if it was a car or truck. As the noise grew clearer then louder, then in a brief moment it became larger and louder then life. 

Only a few feet away multiple tons of speeding mass rushed by me at seventy miles per hour or more, the deafening noise and the blast of air was mixed with a momentary look into another set of human eyes. 

In a moment the brief encounter goes quiet and fades into the distance. I return to the sounds of my breathing, the ticking of my clip in peddle  and my thoughts.