March. Driving to Work. The road to work is pretty much a straight one: sixty kilometres of highway, with various turn-offs, intersections and lights.  It passes a small shopping mall, a tiny airport, various yards stacked with lumber, used car lots, garages, two farmer’s markets.  To the left:  high ground, still snow-capped; to the right, glimpses of the ocean.  Houses. Spindly, densely packed trees, third or fourth growth.

Occasional fields. What you see most of all, however, is the road itself:  signals, blacktop, crash barriers, signage, and of course the cars and trucks ahead or glimpsed in the mirrors. Basically, it’s a matter of pass or is passed on a two way river of metal and glass; the road reels out and on, suspending us drivers in the means to our ends: an active trance, a kind of super-alert sleep…..  Until the brake lights ahead go on and we’re down to forty, then twenty kilometres per hour.  Ten. Gaps narrow; traffic clots solid, vehicles pack the road ahead until it disappears around a bend.  All of a sudden we are going nowhere.

Some days, the sky is spectacular:  cerulean, stormy, or multiply rainbowed, but today it’s an even grey. We sit under it and wait, each in our metal box.  One by one, we switch off our engines; reach for the radio or phone.  A grey-haired man in the Subaru next to me winds down his window, lights up a smoke.  And, according to temperament, we rage against or resign ourselves to the delay. Perhaps five minutes pass before the reason for our standstill appears: a perfectly groomed chestnut horse, so real that he seems like some kind of hallucination - appears between a piled logging truck and an empty school bus. He trots at a steady pace against the now-stilled flow of traffic.  Choosing always the widest gaps, anticipating, never slackening his pace, he threads his way between the vehicles as if they were simply part of the landscape.  His mane floats up and sinks again with each step.  He is about fifteen hands tall, unfettered by any kind of reins or bridles. I lose sight of him when he disappears behind another truck but then he reappears suddenly, just feet away: I look up from my uncomfortable bucket seat at a four-legged being from the world Before Automobiles. Alert ears; deep, velvet nostrils; soft lips; brown eyes fringed with a plethora of lashes, and a glistening coat beneath which every muscle stands out as if independently alive… Oh, to climb up there and be joined to him, part of the fleshy world instead of the glass and metal stream! My own underused musculature aches for a lost world, for movement itself - but all I can do is wind down the window to catch the beat of hooves on the road, the tang of equine sweat as the escaped horse passes by, going, at least for now, where he wants to go.

Our engines cough into life. We pull away from each other, accelerate and drive to work.