Dancing on an Empty Highway

The last rays of daylight drift lazily across the sky, turning the vibrant greens and electric blues and severe grays of northern British Columbia’s wilderness soothingly dull. It’s light enough to see the fine edges of the lakeshore, the definition between the trees crawling up the mountainside; it’s dark enough that shadows are faint or nonexistent, that the dusk seems to have fallen over sound as well as sight.

It’s late, late enough that we are the only travellers on that lonely highway. That we haven’t passed someone going the other direction in over an hour, that even as we stop on the side of the road and watch the water ripple for the better part of half an hour not a single car passes.

It’s nowhere in a way that I haven’t experienced before. To me, nowhere has always been a ghost town in the heart of a barren desert. An unobstructed view from horizon to horizon, the dirt of the earth visible from end to end, an immense blank space, alone with yourself and your thoughts, perhaps a single coyote slinking between dry and barren plants in the distance and it ignores you entirely, disdaining any reprieve from its solitude. Nowhere means this emptiness is a common sight, but over that distant hill there’s almost certainly a town, even if it’s no more than ten buildings and a gas station. Beyond it, another stretch of nowhere, and beyond that, another ten buildings and a gas station. Even though the land is vast and dry and lonely, nowhere is still frequented by travellers. Even at night, another set of headlights will wink out from the darkness, if you break down, someone will come along, and the nearest town, small as it may be, will not be terribly far away, and you’ll be able to see it, to know you aren’t alone, long before you reach it.

Before this, I’d never known nowhere. This is nowhere both because of its isolation and because it could be anywhere. The mountains crouch close together, the trees are dense and tall, the road winds and creeps and the darkness, when it settles, is so complete that a part of me wonders if all humanity could blink out of existence and I wouldn’t even notice.

It’s so desolate that the road looks like a playground, I’m more confident that no cars are coming than I have ever been, even when the road was long and straight and stretched horizon to horizon and I could plainly see that it was empty. The road here curves, I can see only several hundred feet of it in either direction, but this is truly Nowhere, and it’s after 10 pm, though daylight still rests quietly in the sky, and I know that no one is coming, that we’re the only travelers on this road, so I dance over the asphalt, spinning around and around until I’m dizzy and lay down on the pavement to catch my breath. I do cartwheels and laugh and cheer as Zach drops down to do pushups.

We’re alone, and there’s no one to hear us, so we shout and sing, we listen for echoes, but this isn’t the empty sort of nowhere that I’m so familiar with. This is nowhere that’s completely full of life, and our voices stay close by, heard only by the forest and the lake and the birds and all the wildlife that I can only assume is keeping to the darkest corners, watching us with confusion and irritation. I imagine the dozens of eyes that might be on us, wondering what sort of creatures would kick up such a racket, and even though this is nowhere, we aren’t truly alone.

A town could be around that corner, but I know there isn’t. We could be ten miles from gas, but I know we’re not. There could be anything, anyone, less than a day’s hike in any direction, but we’d never know it. This place is nowhere both because it’s remote, and because it could be anywhere. It could be in any country, in any timezone. I can’t see the horizon. My world has become this stretch of road, a few hundred feet in either direction, and for the first time in my life, I’m truly nowhere.

Never have I felt so free.

The world is more beautiful in that moment than I’ve ever known it to be. Never before have I appreciated lonelieness. It had always been a terrifying, threatening thing, something I fled from into the pages of books. But in that moment, it’s the key to the universe. It’s the key to being everywhere at once. It makes me feel like I can see bears and deer and porcupine peering out at me from the understory, their eyes sparkling and lips turned up in something like a smile.

It’s that loneliness of nowhere that puts the stars in my eyes, so I can look up and see more of them than I’ve ever spotted before, even though the sun still hasn’t gone down. They’re there because there’s nothing between me and the cosmos. They’re there because I can feel them, can feel the turn of the Earth pulling at each beat of my heart. They’re there because there’s so much beauty around me I can imagine the magnificence of the rest of the universe. Planets bathed in that rich, bright green. Stars burning a blue so hot it could match the electric, glacial pools. Whole star systems red with iron, like berries scattered across the night sky.

There’s magic in that loneliness. With no one there to see us, no one for miles to hear us, we could be anyone. I become, in that moment, everything I’ve ever dreamed for myself. I’m a Russian nesting doll, every fantastical version of myself wrapping around me like warm blankets, and those dreams have never felt so reachable. If I squint, I can almost see how this corner of the world came to be. I can see the magma cooling and the mountains rising, the rock eroding, tiny saplings sprouting from between the cracks. I can see the glaciers form and melt again, leaving behind that gorgeous lake, can see the forest grow and collapse and grow over itself, can see the animals evolving as they make it their home, as the forest makes them its home in turn, as they become two sides of the same coin, flora and fauna, a joint venture. I can see the men pounding their way through the mountains as they first lay the route for this highway, can see the pavement finally go down, the countless people on bicycles and horses and in cars as they wear it down, the crews that come to fix it up, the people who wear it down again.

I see it all, right up to the two of us pulling up in a big white van, pulling to a stop, silencing the engine, and holding this moment in our hands, keeping it frozen as we watch history unfold, study the countless futures that might come before us, take in the immense, serene beauty of this tiny little corner of the world, where nowhere and loneliness mean so much more than the definitions of those words could ever hope to convey.

I came to the Stewart-Cassiar highway thinking nowhere was desolate, that lonely was frightening.

There’s more magic in those two words than in all the Grimm brothers’ fairytales. It’s a magic I’m afraid I might spend the rest of my life chasing. It’s a magic that just might be worth it.