Well, I’ve been considering for some years how best to approach sorting and crafting a compendium of all the roadside memorial photos I’ve taken over the last decade or so, how I might frame their context, in what manner I might best render a distant honor for folks who met their untimely ends on our highways.
We’ve all seen them on our roadway medians and roadside shoulders. While I can only speak for Southern California myself, they tend to sprout up in dense, urban areas with more vehicles per capita and conversely, alongside rural roads where more people drive under the influence or at high speeds.
I know, I know. It seems a bit morbid. I’m not into the macabre, nor overtly fascinated by cultures of the dead. I started pulling over and stopping to commemorate these lost lives taken by the various dangers of our highways about ten years ago, give or take a year. I figured their families and friends wouldn’t mind such gestures, since they took painstaking measures to erect those public shrines, presumably to let all passersby know of their lost loved one and their exit from this world around that mile marker of that same road I was traveling, the same one as their loved one was traveling when they suddenly came to the end of their journeys here on planet earth.
Because that’s how car crashes are, aren’t they? Sudden. Unexpected. Violent. Blunt force trauma, enough to extinguish lives, infants and children and teenagers, elders and parents alike. Car wrecks are as much a part of American life as apple pie and baseball, since the Model-T first proliferated across the country in the early 1900’s. Cars and trucks are two to five tons of metal, fiberglass, and sharp edges. Operating them at high speeds, each vehicle commanded by a distinct individual with their own specific moods, perceptions, abilities to pay attention and think fast, naturally incurs the randomness of accidental happenstance.
115 people die every day in the United States from car crashes, about one death every 13 minutes. Car crashes are the leading cause of death in the United States for people aged 1-54. They account for nearly one half of all teenage deaths between 13-19. Near 4,000 people die in vehicular accidents each year in California, and across the United States, about 40,000 plus Americans die each year in car wrecks.
No mystery there. We are addicted to our personal transports. In California, trying to get around this big of a state without a car is like cutting a steak with a cheese grater. It can be done, but it’s a huge pain in the ass.
In my travels, it became irrefutably evident, after snapping hundreds of photos of roadside honorariums, that the overwhelming majority of them were testaments to lost loved ones who stemmed from Latino or Indigenous origins. Some of that may be because Latino and Native cultures often commemorate death as part of everyday life (while I’m not Latino nor Indigenous, I do celebrate the Day of the Dead). Their adherence to cultural customs in the placing of descansos as funerary functions is another part of it. Roadside shrines are endemic to the southwestern United States because of a 200-year-old tradition amongst Latino and Mesoamerican populations, where small white crosses called descansos marked pathways for the living to walk in a funerary procession between the church and the graveyard.
Car accidents are the third leading cause of death for Latinos, behind cancer and heart disease. In many academic studies I’ve read while researching stats of American highway demographics, it appears Native Americans suffer the most traffic casualties per capita, followed by Latinos and Blacks. It may be that I’ve seen more memorials for Latinos because I live in California, where Hispanics make up 40% of the population, the most prevalent ethnicity in the state (35% are white, the other 25% a mix of Black, Asian, and Native American), or it may be that Latinos are the population most invested in practicing such customs.
When I see one of these evolved iterations of descansos, I stop, when I can, if it’s safe to do so. Oftentimes, memorials are already in my rear view mirror before I can pull over safely to pay my respects, because I whizzed right by at top speed. Sometimes they’re erected at dangerous positions alongside the road, with no medians or parking shoulders. It’s a paradoxical construct, I’ve discovered, because while they were seemingly built for drivers to glance at as they speed by, their frequent intricacies, details, and the names inscribed on the markers can’t be often be seen unless one stops and takes a moment, which of course implies they weren’t built primarily as testimonials for random passersby to honor, but rather for the loved ones of the deceased.
I do this because I’m an aspiring, SoCal, pseudo-shaman of a kind, for whatever that’s worth. I’ve known death in my life. For better and worse, depending on my mood, I tend to see life and death as more than static states of black-or-white being, that our life cycles aren’t quite the linear reality we see them as, and that both as individuals and as a species, we’re part of a larger sphere of reality we can’t yet perceive and that our energy/souls/spirits/essences/whatever-you-want-to-call-them, are transitional or transformative in nature, like, presumably, all other types of energy in the universe, at least those kinds we can currently perceive.
Ten-cent words aside, I’ve vibed enough about existence to intuit death probably isn’t the final end for us that we fear it is. And so, when I come upon a memorial while traveling, I see it as a gateway, a tangible monument that, through the thoughts and emotions of humans still residing here on earth, not only represents a token for someone who’s entered the next world, it also supplies a focal point for anyone interested in such endeavors to utilize that specific spot as a conduit for spirituality. Not because the dead are loitering about there, as we so often anthropomorphize in cemeteries at gravestone markers, but because its construction itself came from a place of spirit…of honor…of grief…of love.
In other words, the loved ones of that passed soul made that little piece of pavement or hillside or desert soil a place of sacred ground. They canonized it, simply by geographically marking the passage of their departed. They made that mile marker holy, and it doesn’t matter what dogma the structure honors from tradition, only that their feelings for their loved one made that roadside patch of dirt a place of peace, a place of love. And in my writings, both fictional and nonfictional, I often suggest, through my varied narratives, that love and emotional evolution are almost certainly the highest existential constructs throughout the cosmos, and, I would dare to say, the higher dimensions as well. Intellect and intelligence are fine and dandy like the state fair’s cotton candy, but refining the brainy-brains will only get us so far. It’s our connection to all living creatures, that collective energy we all share, the ‘'all is one” jazz…that’s the pure, sweet tea lemonade.
I know, I know. I’m sounding fruity pebbles when I say that kinda stuff. Take it with a grain of salt. Embrace this column for what it will eventually become, which again, I can’t identify in advance what that will be. At minimum, it ought to end up being a consortium of remembrance. Perhaps it will offer insights on what it means to be a fragile, corporeal entity in a physical universe, and how we primates just might be something more than bags of stardust and water.
It’s going to be as new for me as it will be for dedicated subscribers. I am certain there are authors or photo journalists who’ve already done this kinda stuff concerning freeway memorials. I didn’t bother to look up examples, because I don’t want to inadvertently usurp ideas. I’ll just go ahead and hope the words are compelling enough to distinguish the work and my reflections on the nuances of life on the road, small town life, big city life, the existentialism of abruptly meeting our ends, the precarious balance of order and chaos on our highways as well as our everyday lives.
I figure a stranger taking a moment to remember an unknown someone, through their loves ones’ commemorations, reading epithets and testimonials carved into makeshift wooden crosses, or names chiseled into garden stones, looking at a favorite football jersey tattered from exposure, or plastic flowers and weathered photos lit at night by solar-powered lawn lanterns, and children’s plastic toys half-melted from the baking desert sun…
A stranger doing that, for someone they never knew, just can’t be a bad thing.
As long as it can be done safely. That’s a caveat for anyone who might consider doing this on occasion, should they find the inspiration after reading. Don’t get yourself killed by running across highways, okay? There’s a right and a wrong way to do it, and if the descanso you come upon is in any way difficult to reach or risky to try and do so, keep driving. Safety first. The departed surely would tell us that themselves, if only we could hear them.
Offering brief salutations to that person who’s shed the mortal coil, from wherever I am on the roads, to wherever they are in worlds that lie beyond this one, I can’t imagine that kind of karma is unwelcome to a colder universe. More pertinent, I would hope it might provide some distant strength, source unknown, to their families, spouses, children, or parents they left behind. I assume those folks would find some appreciation in the effort, since they spent plenty of sweat and tears to build their public testaments, many of which are tended to month after month, replenishing flowers, replacing rained-upon photos with new ones, touching up paint, and the like.
It must be upsetting to them when Cal-Trans road crews clear those memorials from the roadsides, and they do, on occasion. Oftentimes, new shrines pop up afterward all the same. Technically, California’s Department of Transportation doesn’t condone this roadside funerary custom, but they look the other way most of the time. The state has a program where memorials can be officially registered and erected by CalTrans employees alongside highways for victims of drunk driving crashes, an ‘official’ plague and marker, which appeals little to Latino cultures because they tend to commemorate death in vivid, festive styles, lots of flowers and bright colors and personal tokens of the deceased, frequently crowned with the Catholic cross, as is their custom.
Some might say dying in a car crash is as good a way to die as any. I’m not certain that’s accurate. The esoteric problem with death-by-car-accident is that they’re so violent and they usually involve multiple drivers and passengers. That latter truth is of course the most heinous, a matter of a single person making a bad choice, be it drunk driving, or texting while driving, or inattention, or whatever, and that decision results in not only their own ends, but the ends of others as well. Driving in America is a risky proposition. There’s no doubt about it. I’ve been driving every day of my life since I was fifteen, some forty odd years now, and I’ve driven some seriously sketchy roads presenting any number of dangers including bad weather, shitty drivers, and poorly maintained roads. In California, the car is king, and we Californians are all knee-bent to the king with unyielding fealty. Anybody who’s spent significant time on the north or southbound 405 in Los Angeles, or on Highway 62 from Yucca Valley to 29 Palms, or on the I-80 bumper to bumper sitting on the Bay Bridge day after day in their commute, or on the long, arid stretch of the 15 out to Vegas, knows precisely what I mean.
In any case, I think what we’ll do hereabouts is, I’ll post a photo, or a series of photos, with each entry, scheduled to drop by noonish, Pacific Standard Time, on every Wednesday. I’ll try to remember exactly where I took it in California or Nevada. Depending on the surroundings, I’m sure I’ll recognize where most of the markers were placed, but perhaps not every one. The picture taken in this first entry, located above, was of a simple, plain descanso with no epithet or epitaph, nor the name of the deceased. I don’t recall where it was taken, because I neglected to pan back and shoot a more distant shot of the marker in order to recall its location in the future. At the time, I really didn’t know why I was stopping and shooting these photos, during my wanderings about California. That habit was often done in a harried manner, leaving my truck running in the median, my dogs waiting for me in the cab, all while traffic flew by me at 70 plus miles per hour.
I can safely assert many of these photos were snapped somewhere in California’s deserts.
That may or may not surprise you, depending on how well you’re acquainted with the high and low desert life in California.
We’ll certainly be talking about the high desert and its eclectic breed of residents in this column, that’s a guarantee.
Along with the pix, we’ll discuss some adjacent phenomenology about road life in America, or our codependency on our vehicular addictions, or our philosophies of death. Maybe we’ll just pass along our collective well-wishes to the departed for that entry.
This will be an evolving Substack entity, not pre-planned nor pre-written, unlike the other two sectors of The Last Days of Generation X. It’ll be an adult discussion, surely. No getting around that.
If that’s not the kinda butter you want on your Substack toast, and you maybe wanna read something more entertaining and less metaphysical, might I respectfully suggest heading on over to The Worldshift Chronicles for some top shelf escapism and magical adventure.
All right, then.
Let’s see what we shall see, in this exposition of blood and tar, life and light.
Well, that's the opening to your book.
This was a great read. I'm in SoCal too, in Los Angeles now but used to live off of Highway 62, so I know it incredibly well.