Driving south until the radio gives up

The map said four hours. The map was lying, but politely — it never accounts for the tope outside San Andrés, or the kid selling mangoes at the third gas station, or the way the afternoon light turns the windshield into a yellow plate you can’t see through. We left Mexico City at six. We reached Zicatela just after the second sunset, which is to say once for the sky and again for the lagoon.

I had brought a notebook to argue with myself about velocity. Specifically: the suspicion that everything I’d filed in the last three years had been written too fast, on trains, on planes, in the back of cars going somewhere it would have been better to walk. Highway 200 was the experiment. Five hundred kilometers, no schedule, one rented Tsuru with a stereo that only played the left channel.

The cassette is the argument

Somewhere past Pinotepa Nacional the tape jammed. I pried it out with a key and the magnetic ribbon came with it, a long brown curl on the dashboard, and that was the end of music for two days. What replaced it was the road — diesel, cicadas, the long exhale of a refrigerator truck climbing the grade out of Puerto Escondido. I think this is what I came for and what I have, increasingly, been trying to write around.