nerdgod.com

As a kid, my high school was a two-story red brick building on a rural stretch of US Route 40. I’d occasionally ride my bike up there, from our house near I-70 (four or five miles south) to visit a friend of mine who lived up the road. In those days, my world was bounded by a few fixed points, Springfield, Yellow Springs, and Dayton to the east and south, and the Great Unknown to the west. I had heard that US 40 ran from the east coast to the west coast, along the 40th parallel (which incidentally, it doesn’t. The numbering is just a happy accident), and I’d wonder what would happen if I rode west… what lay out there, in the vast American frontier. Where might I end up?

I-40 ran from Atlantic City to San Francisco. These days, it ends in the west just outside of Salt Lake City, merging with I-80, which follows its old route westward. (I blame this discontinuity fully on the Mormons.) Eventually I-80 crosses into california, through oakland, and crosses the Bay Bridge to end right inside San Francisco. Now, a couple of years ago, I had a job that put me at 444 Spear st. in San Francisco, which is under the Bay Bridge as it makes its landfall. So to that wide-eyed child of 15 that I was, I’d like to say “the road ends in work. Work and a bad case of food poisoning. Don’t eat the Shwarma.”

And I’d like to think that the connection between those two points–high school and the job that gave me a year off so I could spend a month and a half in europe–that the connection means something. Which is why people believe in ley lines. Because they want to believe that ancient trails and holy places are somehow connected by unseen forces. But I think my friend Wayne put it best “Uh, Ian. A lot of roads are connected. Otherwise you couldn’t get anywhere.”