Free from Entanglements

I was driving on I-80 East from Cheyenne to Omaha when I pulverized a metaphor.

It rolled out of the ditch and skittered across the road in front of my truck. There was no time to swerve and I hit it head on. I flinched, expecting some sort of impact, but the tumbleweed just exploded into thousands of dry pieces. No damage done, but it did get me focused back on my surroundings.

On the long drive across the plains it’s easy to let your attention drift. Everything from the waving grass to the ranches and rusty tractors in the distance seem to have the same brown hue. It blends together into a panorama of flat rural sprawl.

There was a barbed wire fence that ran parallel to the interstate. This fence was there to keep snow drifts from forming across the highway and as a last barrier to dissuade antelope and mule deer from wandering into traffic. It also served as a net catching loose tufts of grass, drifting garbage, and a long line of dry impatient tumbleweeds. There were hundreds of them. I could see them twitching and tugging in the wind. Some were hopelessly entangled, others were holding on with a tenuous grip, barely attached.

Every now and then a tumbleweed would escape the fence or the branches of other weeds and make a break for the opposite side of the road. It would roll up the ditch and start skipping over the pavement.

It needed to cross two lanes of westbound traffic, a median, and two more lanes of eastbound traffic. If it avoided the chrome grills of the semi-trucks or the angled hoods of minivans it would bounce down the opposite ditch and run right into another fence.

I imagined the conversation that the tumbleweeds were having from each side of the barbed wire, some heading south and others north. “Hey, what color is the grass on that side of the road?

I kept watching this mad dash as the miles wore on. Once, an energetic bush flew up over the ditch, dodged its way across the traffic, and headed down towards the next fence.

Just as the tumbleweed was about to hit, a gust of wind lifted it up and over the top wire.

I cheered.

It was free to roll on, just empty plains and the next horizon in its path.