ET Highway doesn’t guarantee ‘sightings,’ but it’s worth trip
I thought I’d heard quiet before but I hadn’t.
Standing on the dotted yellow line in the middle of the two-lane Extraterrestrial Highway, watching it stretch out straight in front of me until it ended at a point in the distance, all I could hear was my own breathing. There was no wind in the miles-wide, flat valley that stretched out on either side of the highway, its floor turning from reddish brown to grayish blue the farther it got from me. There were no leaves to rustle had there been any breeze — just some low brush and a few Joshua trees, their short, gnarled arms twisting heavenward.
The sky was
blue like deep water
and virtually cloudless and the road was serenely empty, despite it being mid-afternoon.
It’s so quiet, I thought, that if someone standing three miles down the road had cracked a knuckle, I’d have heard it.
But other than a handful of yellow diamond-shaped road signs warning us about “low-flying aircraft,” and eating an “alien burger” for lunch (which tasted inexplicably like beef) we didn’t catch any signs of visitors from other worlds — though, frankly, if we had, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the least.
