I remember long driving trips when I was a kid. It made my stomach hurt when everybody would fight in the car but I loved it when it was four am and everybody was asleep but me and my dad. Him in the front behind the steering wheel and me way way in the way back. Quiet, except for car sounds and road sounds.

And later, when we stopped at a motel, I loved the moments before everybody woke up and started agitating each other. Deep, dark quiet, except for sounds from a nearby road. I’ve always loved the sound of a nearby highway that you hear lying in a motel room bed when the hotel is located just off the road. Near an interchange, it’s doorway-magical, remote intersections and big important intersections alike.

My new room is like that, in fact it’s located very near several motels serving Santa Cruz tourists, just a few blocks away from the highway. I lie in bed at night and listen to the cars, a steady distant roar. Not so close that I can hear the approach and departure of individual vehicles, but close enough to be understood as the sound of cars, lots of cars moving fast.

It’s the sound of people I don’t know driving, doing things, traveling, living lives outside of my awareness. If I didn’t hear it I would never know they were moving around, making plans, but because of the sound I’m touched by their orbit. I’m a kind of spectator to the atmospheric disturbance they’re creating. I like being a spectator, I like seeing and not being seen, hearing and not being heard. Especially lying in bed being a spectator. Lying in bed in a darkened room watching the murky blue sky through the skylight and listening to cars, movement, travel. I’m warm and safe in my bed and they’re all out there moving the air.

For the longest time I’ve been deeply, romantically involved with the everyday, no matter where I live. Predictable in my habits. I walk this way on Mondays and Thursdays. Saturday mornings I read magazines in the bookstore. I love the familiar because it’s never as familiar as it seems. Repeating behaviors in a rhythm never fails to turn up startling discoveries. But the sound of cars on the highway is a reminder of another level of discovery, traveler/driver newness. That’s fantasy-type adventure, that driving on the highway at night thing. A road trip, maybe. Something even less planned- an escape? Stealing the car and heading out of town? How lovely to imagine it all while lying in bed.

I had a lover I used to drive around with and now, even after I’ve put away all the momentos and made my peace with the disastrous breakup, I still feel a pang when I think of us in the car driving nowhere in particular to look at trees.

I imagine people driving on the highway, two people, a couple, and they’ve never been to Santa Cruz before. It’s late and they live far away and they’re deciding to stop here. I’ll see them in the window of the motel foyer eating their complimentary breakfast cereal when I’m on my way to work. I’ll envy them their traveler status, even if they’re both miserable because their car is making ominous noises and they’re fighting about money and they’re both secretly heartbroken to be sleeping in separate beds. I don’t envy them all of that. But they’re here for the first time. That’s what I miss, once again.