Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Jun 14, 2007

Thinking Out Loud: Shimmering neon lights

There’s a Kraftwerk song that you might not know if you never did what I did and collect all the records. It goes like this:

Neon lights
Shimmering neon lights
And at the fall of night
This city's made of light

over and over again.

It’s my current earworm. We've had occasion lately to travel quite frequently at night, sometimes on bikes and sometimes in the van. While doing so I have remembered how much I like the sight of street lights and car lights and yes, of course, neon lights, twinkling and lighting up the dark.

There is a lot of dark in California. You wouldn't know it from the satellite pictures, the ones which highlight light pollution. But in the UK at least, freeways are lit up in the same way streets are. Here, you’re left to fend. My night vision isn't brilliant, and there have been occasions when I've been next to blind, trying to figure out where the lines are on a particularly black stretch of road.

But the oases of rest areas offer me little glimpses of humanity. Fast food signs and hotel signs vye for my attention like male birds trying to impress a mate with their plumage, offer me little glimpses of humanity. Ahead, in the distance, yellow street lights rise up above the empty black of the countryside. I might be riding along, my pupils fully dilated, not able to see more than a couple of feet ahead–but they are out there, reminding me that I won’t have to be in the dark forever.

That is somehow very comforting.

One of the scariest movies I ever saw was Pitch Black. In this world, visitors arrive (in)conveniently just as the planet starts one of its days-long eclipses. Then the nasty bird-monsters come out, only able to survive in the complete darkness. They pick off the characters one by one, suddenly, the moment the lights go out. There were no neon lights on that planet. Just flashlights that went out and flares that failed–as one would expect of a horror/sci-fi movie. Every so often when I go to visit some caves the sadistic guide plinks off the lights and plunges everyone into hushed, velvet black. It would be like that. A couple of seconds of it are more than enough. Someone always breaks the silence and says, “Er…”

The long stream of oncoming cars, on freeways busy even late at night, remind me of trips taken as a child, dropping off to seat in the back. Seeing them like that evokes emotion, nostalgia, something comforting and peaceful. So, as I ride along, buffeted by the winds on Altamont Pass with very little scenery to occupy my mind, I hum the song to myself. I hum it to remind myself that there will be light again, and that I will get home, and that I will eventually get to bed.

I hum it over and over again.