27 Magazine Gap Road
Maybell Hughs
The Public Roads Student Writing Competition entry acceptance period has ended. We thank everyone who took time to research, write, and submit their entries. All students will be notified by email in December if their article was chosen to be featured in the Winter 2025 issue of Public Roads magazine. This year judges are selecting a total of four articles representing the best overall, first, second and third place.
Established in 1918, Public Roads is the premier quarterly magazine of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). Each issue covers the latest in highway research and development, innovation and technology, and program advancements that benefit the Nation and create safer, more resilient roadways and structures.
Public Roads emphasizes the continuing commitment of FHWA to be an international leader in promoting highway research and technology transfer for transportation professionals across the Nation and around the world. The more than 100-year-old magazine explores advances and innovations in highway, traffic, and bridge research and technology; critical national transportation issues; program advancement and achievements of FHWA and others in the highway community; and timely subjects of interest to industry professionals.
For almost 80 years, Public Roads was exclusively an in-house research journal for engineers, scientists, and economists. However, in the summer of 1993, Public Roads broadened its scope to represent all areas of FHWA while offering articles that appealed to a wider audience. The expanded audience now includes international, national, State, local, and Tribal transportation officials; members of highway-related professional societies and associations; researchers at technical libraries and technology transfer centers; professors and students of engineering and traffic management; members of pertinent congressional committees; and others interested in highway research and technology and FHWA policies and programs.
Whether your destination is Portland, Oregon, the Colorado Rockies, cruising down Route 66, or you're dreaming of driving down the scenic highway in California, destined for Mono Lake, or not sure where to road trip to, we invite you to let American Road Magazine be your one-stop source!
Even from the air, the trees appeared enormous. To the north, Lassen Peak and Mount Shasta rose like great silent Mexican gods, white and solemn. When he looked down again, the trees were gone. Entire hillsides slashed into, ravaged, stripped.
Life seemed to be unraveling everywhere that year. The date was May 6, 1968. Vietnam was in full swing, and King had been assassinated just one month earlier. Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country, he wrote in his journal.
On the flight into Eureka, he jotted down notes for talks he would give to the nuns at Redwoods Monastery, a young abbey nestled among trees that were already saplings by the time Jesus was born. He copied dense philosophical quotes by Hegel, Unamuno, and Sartre, but in his journal such abstract quotes soon gave way to the language of direct encounter, as if once his hand touched redwood bark, those erstwhile forests of philosophical thought quickly lost stature, dwarfed by comparison.
I was curious why he made the journey at all. For years he had longed to live in a hermitage in the woods on the grounds at Gethsemani Abbey, until finally his abbot granted his request. What more was he still seeking?
The sisters of Redwoods Abbey are Trappists, also known as Cistercians of the Strict Observance, a worldwide Catholic monastic order of men and women who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Cistercian reforms of the eleventh century. Those reforms brought a return to simplicity, contemplative prayer, and silence. At a time when Christianity was taking a centuries-long detour into logic and rationalism, Cistercian monks were turning their attention inward, to the heart, where Jesus said we would find the kingdom of God.
Bashō walked north with no purpose other than his own unfulfilled longings: to see the full moon rise over the mountains of the Kashima Shrine, to see the pine tree of Aneha and the bridge of Odae, or to inhabit a scene like the one he describes in this haiku:
Such is the power of literary influence. For much of our lives, the world spins past at too great a speed for us to notice, but sometimes we find a thread. We trace it back. Time and distance fall away. Suddenly we feel as if we are in the presence of the ancients themselves; we stand beside Merton as he stands beside Bashō on a deserted mountain in seventeenth-century Japan, all of us watching an aged farmer digging his wild potatoes. We feel the loneliness of that scene, yet we are not alone. We partake together. Heart speaks to heart across the centuries. This is the divine artifice at work and we strive to equal it: with our pens, with our lives.
I join the sisters for Mass, and afterward Sister Kathy invites me to sit and chat over more coffee and cookies. Sister Kathy arrived at the monastery in the early seventies, driving a green Triumph Spitfire convertible. When I ask what drew her to the monastic life, she tells me of a certain experience she had as a child, which she marks as the beginning of her spiritual quest. When she was six, her appendix ruptured. She nearly died. After two weeks in the hospital, Kathy arrived home. It was Easter Sunday, and while her large Italian family bustled around her, she remembers sitting in a chair, feet dangling over the edge, watching a single ray of sunlight spill through the window and illumine the space beneath her feet. Adults and siblings kept talking, oblivious to what she was sensing. In that moment she dropped beneath the noise and discovered God waiting for her. Here, she felt, was the life beyond life.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.
On the Mendocino coast, Thomas Merton sat on a grassy bench halfway between Needle Rock and Bear Harbor. Further north toward Shelter Cove he saw a manufactory of clouds where the wind piles up smoky moisture along the steep flanks of the mountains. Their tops are completely hidden.
Bear Harbor he liked better than Needle Rock. More isolated. At Bear Harbor wild irises and calla lilies grew wild among the ferns. Perhaps he could set up a trailer and live here in this hollow, surrounded by ancient Lombardy poplars, green firs, wild foxgloves.
Eight crows wheeled in the sky overhead, casting their shadows on the bare hillside. He read the Astavakra Gita on reincarnation, looked out over the Pacific, and wrote: Reincarnation or not, I am as tired of talking and writing as if I had done it for centuries. Now it is the time to listen at length to this Asian ocean. In the fall he would cross this Asian ocean on a different pilgrimage, one that would be his last.
I walk north along a wide, grassy bench above the coast, a cool breeze on my face. Uphill to my right I pass the elk herd. Below to my left big rollers crash against the cliffs, coaxing the land back into the sea. Everything in bloom reaches my nose: wild mustard, bush lupine, wild iris, and the hypnotic perfume of calla lilies. I walk down a steep trail to Jones Beach and take off my shoes, the small, black pebbles warm on my toes. Around a bend I discover a flat-rock outcrop, the perfect perch on which to sit and watch the surf.
The ocean has long been the great symbol of mystical union with God. With the vast Pacific before me, I recall the story Merton told of the early Irish monks who took that metaphor literally, becoming pilgrims on the open sea.
Driving that May of 1968 on the road to Christ in the Desert, a new Benedictine monastery in the Chama River Canyon of northern New Mexico, Merton was bombarded by impressions. Snow up high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and then a marvelous long line of snowless, arid mountains, clean long shapes stretching for miles under pure light. Mesas, full rivers, cottonwoods, sagebrush, high red cliffs, pion pines. Most impressed of all by the miles of emptiness.
Whether Merton sought God here in this desert canyon or along the desolate Mendocino coast or in the deep hush of the redwoods, he began to suspect that his search for the perfect hermitage was a chimera. The country which is nowhere is the real home. His real home was le point vierge, the place in himself reserved only for God. Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.
The founder of Christian monasticism was Saint Anthony the Great. In the third century, Saint Anthony left his life in the city and went to live and pray in solitude in the wilderness of Egypt. Others soon followed his example. Within two centuries, so many men and women had fled to monasteries that chroniclers from that period report that the desert had become a city.
On my last full day at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, I decide to climb up to the canyon rim in search of the Anasazi ruins. I want to approach with as much humility as I can that holy place where silence answers in silence. Prior Benedict might disapprove of my solo mission, but by now he is in Costa Rica, and after all, I have taken no vow of obedience.
Sitting in this tiny patch of shade, surrounded by white sage and ocotillo, I bring these thoughts into prayer. Normally my prayers are a dull litany of requests and complaints, the hypes and gripes of a lukewarm spiritual life, but here on the edge of this vast mesa, I feel those petitions giving way to something more compelling, an opening into a more spacious country. An uncomplicated resting in God, who seems to have no other agenda than to welcome me into this place of silence and mercy and at-oneness. A feeling of Presence that is so much more than the breeze on my face or the sweat evaporating on my skin.
93ddb68554