MASS

Banff was supposed to be the ceiling. The insurmountable objective. The place I'd looked at on a map at nineteen and thought... there. That's as far as someone like me gets to go.

I'd left it that morning as a pit stop.

Wonowon, BC. Dead of night. Go With The Flow playing on repeat. The sky above the Alaska Highway was the wrong color, still blue, a deep impossible blue, hazy at the edges in a way that felt like nostalgia without an object. Not nostalgia for anything specific. Just the feeling arriving uninvited the way it does when you're alone, moving fast and the world is suddenly too large to argue with.

I'd gotten dumped. Went to Alaska. Wrote that down for future reference.

Two people knew roughly where I was. Maybe. I was the only one who knew why.

Fort Nelson. Two hours of sleep on the floor of a campground because stopping felt like losing and I wasn't ready to lose yet. Back on the road before the cricket on my shoulder could say pump the brakes. Toad River. Gas station. Stood at the pump for five minutes while a full tank sat there waiting for someone to pull a lever. One lever needed to turn on the pump motor in -33F. I'd never encountered this mechanism in my many years and decided it had to have been broken down. The gas stayed.

Muncho Lake was trying to say something. I had my sunglasses on against the snow blindness, beard overgrown, squinting anyway, sixteen hours into the drive on two hours of sleep, white knuckling the edges of the lake in the gray before sunrise when the road became unavailable.

Black shapes. Erupting around a corner in a white world.

My body froze before my brain voted. Not the freeze of danger. The freeze of the world briefly failing to make sense. I was on two hours of sleep on a frozen lake two days from anyone who knew where I was and the landscape had just produced something that walked on stilts and had no business being there. For one half second I didn't trust what I was seeing.

Then they moved and moving meant real. Phew, no need to check myself in.

Then I looked closer and real meant something else entirely.

Wood bison. Thirty of them, maybe more, crossing the packed snow of the Alaska Highway like the road had been built for exactly this. There used to be almost none of them left, not that long ago as these things go, and here were thirty of them casually inconveniencing a highway at sunrise. I didn't know any of that yet. I only knew there was a great deal of animal in front of me and none of it in any hurry.

I did not choose to stop. The road simply became unavailable.

I sat there with the engine running and watched them cross.

One of them didn't cross.

He stood in the middle of the road once the rest had cleared it, and he did not look at me, and he did not look at the truck, and he gave no sign of knowing either of us was there. The size of him was genuinely offensive. Steam came off him in the cold, slow and unhurried, the breathing of something with absolutely nowhere else it needed to be. My own exhaust fogged the glass and I kept wiping a patch clear with my sleeve to keep him in sight. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough the heater cycled off and back on. Long enough my hands quit shaking from the cold and started, a little, from something else.

He took a step toward the shoulder. Then another, in no particular hurry, like the place belonged to him and always had.

He folded himself down into the snow at the edge of the road and closed his eyes.

He was tired. That was the whole of it. No negotiation, no permission requested, no argument made to anyone, including himself. He was tired, so he stopped, in the middle of the Alaska Highway, with a stranger's truck idling forty feet away.

I teared up.

I had left a full tank of gas behind that morning because I couldn't work a lever.

Not long after, the last of the herd cleared off, and he stayed where he'd put himself, dark against the white. Nothing left in front of me. No headlights behind, none coming the other way, hadn't been for hours. The road just sat there, open, exactly as available now as it had been unavailable twenty minutes earlier. Nobody had asked me if I was ready for either.

I got back on the highway.

Watched the needle climb the way it had climbed a hundred times already. Go With The Flow came back around, same volume, same me behind the wheel. For a mile or two the old machine even turned over the way it always had: point it north, keep the pedal down, let the miles do to the breakup whatever miles are supposed to do.

It didn't take.

There are things, I've come to think, with enough mass to make whatever direction you were headed simply irrelevant, and they don't ask permission first. Someone enters the world. Someone leaves it. The phone rings and it isn't a normal call. A doctor walks into a room. Some of it's the best thing that will ever happen to you. Some of it's the worst. Either way, whatever you were doing five minutes before gets very small, very fast.

I didn't have any of that language at twenty. I had an odometer and a lake shrinking in the mirror.

I pulled over and slept.