The act of leaping or starting asunder.
When I lived in Florida I drove long, long miles, directionless and free, with limited regard to the time spent or the destination. I never memorized the roads, just as I have never (in 19 years ofliving in New York) memorized Central Park or even the seemingly obvious numbered street names of midtown Manhattan. I do not like to know where I am, not to a level of detail that today’s geo-coded urban anthropologists assume is normal.
My mind wandered far and deep on some of those long drives. Among the smells of cow shit and polecat I remember certain structural elements of the Interstate that seemed exciting or evocative to me. These were new developments, new roads, new styles of open Interstate designed to accommodate the future of the Tampa Bay area’s ever-growing automobile traffic. I heard stories of traffic solutions (proposed and implemented) from big cities of the world and I imagined Tampa with triple-decker Interstate passages and underground tunnels connecting Bayshore Boulevard to Lutz.
There was one road division I found poetic. I can not remember where but it was a miles-long stretch of Interstate somewhere near Tampa. For several miles the 2-lane road became 3-lanes, and then split into 2, like a hydra. The second 3-lane road was called the same as the one from which it split. Its destination was the same, and even the exits were shared. It was, nevertheless, a completely separate piece of road, a passage used by those ghostly companions of the highway whose lights in your rear view mirror guarantee something — what that something is I never could tell — and whose travels are still the same as yours though they use the newer road.
