There may come a day when you’ll find yourself crawling along an interminable interstate, boxed in by drivers whose hurry to get to their destination is the very reason traffic merely inches forward. But then, you’ll crest a hill or round a bend, and instead of the procession of enameled vehicles glinting in the harshness of the noonday sun, you’ll find a ribbon of unbroken gray asphalt stretching like a conveyor belt to the horizon. The congestion has vanished. But how, miles from an exit, with the road hemmed in by vast swathes of trackless wilderness?
 

It is not your imagination; your fellow travelers have exited the freeway. That point always before you—that dark smudge that seems so impossibly far up ahead, where the road meets the sky—it is no natural phenomena, not the result of light being blocked by the stuff of the horizon. It is a physical point of departure, a wayside of sorts for the travel-weary.

And if, some day, in the doldrums of a monotonous journey, you notice a sudden lightening of traffic, you might want to pause, and ponder: Is it the others who have disappeared into the horizon, or is it you?