570

Sometimes you find yourself somewhere for the very first time and you feel like you belong, like there’s some sort of cosmic force pulling you toward it like a magnet. Even though you’ve never been there before, it feels almost like home. A place secure and serene, yet with no walls to hold you in or keep the world out. You may never live in that place, but that place will always live in you. You don’t find these locations often but when you do, they carve a hole deep in your psyche - persistent worms of inspiration and clarity, like it was always meant to be.

There’s a lonely two lane highway that snakes through Eastern Alberta and into the rugged folds of Saskatchewan. I’ve only been down that road once but it’s a road that reeled me in with its gentle magic and has never let me go. It represents peace in a mind so often filled with non-peaceful thoughts. This is a road which winds for a couple of hundred kilometres through sun-soaked fields of scorched hay and stretched cornflower-blue skies, where you might never pass another vehicle the entire route. Where you’re more likely to encounter grazing antelope than another human being. It’s as though beyond the confines of the road, the real world doesn’t exist. It’s a road dripping with the lazy drone of bees, the lilting creaks of birds and the sweet melody of a silence devoid of man.

Somewhere, amidst all that emptiness, I really feel alive. Small yet significant. Still, yet soaring like a kite. A cool balm of soothing tranquility for a bruised mind. All my problems evaporate into that hot, blue nothingness, leaving behind a slowly rising mist of hope.
It’s a road to nowhere in particular, yet, somehow, a path to everything that’s possible.

You might never get to drive along its remote surface, thick with cracked paint and potholes that hold a thousand stories, but it doesn’t matter because there are lonely roads everywhere just like Highway 570 and when you find one it will always take you where you need to go.