Went back to the six mile stretch. I said I wasnt going to and then I was already on the onramp, thats been happening a lot lately, the deciding and the doing stop lining up the way they used to, I notice it and then its already done. Same lane. Not the whole road, the lane, the one under camera 70 that I already logged once, S/O Hidden Valley, the one lit from nothing, no pole, no housing, I went over all of that on the light page and Im not redoing the whole argument here, the point is I went back to the actual spot this time instead of just pulling the footage off the district feed like I did in September.

There is something in the asphalt where the light lands. Pale, oval, maybe eight inches. ten. I keep saying eight and then measuring it against the lane stripe in my head and getting ten, it doesnt matter, flush with the surface or close to it, the kind of thing you'd walk past in daylight and call a patch job, a cold-mix fill somebody troweled in wrong. I was doing fifty something past it so the shot came out streaked, motion blur dragging the whole lane sideways, I couldnt pull over, there is nowhere to pull over for six miles, thats the entire point of the six miles, so this is what I got. One pass. I am not going back a third time tonight to get a cleaner one, my hands were already bad enough getting this one holding the phone out the window at fifty.

It wasnt there in August. I know that because I have the August frame, its on the light page, I pulled every inch of that lane apart looking for the housing on a fixture that isnt supposed to exist and there was no patch, no mark, nothing but clean shoulder-to-shoulder black. Four weeks. Something got put down in that exact lane in four weeks and I am supposed to believe a cold-mix patch just happens to land under the one light on a six mile stretch that only ever lights the lane a car stops in. Coincidence people love that word. I called the district about the light back in september, same guy, he said hed have to check, that's five now, five calls five checks zero callbacks, the log is still up if anyone wants the dates lined up.

Anyway. My mother used to mark the driveway with chalk when the propane truck was coming so the driver would know where to stop without her out there flagging him down in her robe. A mark where a vehicle is supposed to stop. I dont think thats a stretch, I think thats just what a mark in a stopping lane is for, somebody doesnt want to explain it over a radio every time so they put it on the ground instead, same as the chalk, except this one isnt chalk, this one is going to survive a hundred winters of snowplow if it has to. I am not driving the six miles again before thursday. I already know what thursday is going to show me and I would rather be wrong about that for three more days.