Several times I have seen what I took to be campfires off in a field not far from the highway. I do not know what they actually were. Flames. In the back of my mind I just figured I was hallucinating or conflating something with a reflection from elsewhere, but I did see something. Open flames, red, free against the black bulk of darkened America. Campfires in the night.
Of course they are not actually campfires and I finally figured it out after another night charging through the coastal mountains of British Columbia. What I was seeing were those sodium yard lights the power company sold the farmers of North America to illuminate the farmyards so that meth addicts can see to steal the copper out of their milking parlors and the ammonia out of the tank parked back there behind the hay baler.
Rolling along in the greyhound after midnight, half crazy from sleep deprivation, at just the right angle, a little bit of berm alongside the roadbed raises the grass and weed growing there to flutter across the orange yellow fire-like glow of a distant sodium vapor giving it a lifelike, fire-like animation and fooling the eye that is longing for something anything, to alleviate the fever dreams of midnight America
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