Hallucinatory Gambit

 

There's a sodium security light on Dolan Ridge that casts a wan orange glow onto the pavement through the trees that line the road. It looks as though there's of a group of deer ahead, the color their russet flanks. I fall prey to this illusion every single morning! I get annoyed and complain, “You'd think I'd have learned by now!” But today I realized that it's actually right to be continually fooled. What if there actually were deer standing there one morning? If I became complacent I might easily run straight into them. Still I find it kind of amazing that I am able to remain so unconditioned and open to the moment to be tricked time and again. Is that like Zen, or maybe old age?

That put me in mind of the trucker's legend about the driver who saw an elephant in the road. “That can't be real, it must be a hallucination,” he surmised and kept on driving only to run smack into an elephant standing in the road. It seems the pachyderm had recently escaped from a circus train.

Do I detect a note of incredulity concerning such a gargantuan hallucination? There are many stories of trucker's delusions, most notably the infamous Black Dog that has wrecked more than a few rigs. I myself have only experienced such phenomena once: I was crossing western Utah at night, perfectly legal but nevertheless exhausted, my circadian rhythms way out of whack. Plain as day I saw a log laying across the highway ahead of me. It never occurred to me that I was in the Great Salt Desert where there are no trees, I just wondered, “Am I going to be able to move that thing to keep going?” As I pulled to a stop before it the entire exquisitely detailed log sort of fizzled and disappeared. “Whoa,” I thought, “I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something!” I pulled over at the very next rest area and shut down, though my schedule would only allow a short nap.

The clouds were awesome today. I have sat and stared at clouds before, watching them grow oh so slowly. They were growing so fast today that I could see it happening in stolen glances from the highway!