Road notes: the shape of a good one

Long trip essays are good, and they are slow. Most of what happens on a road is smaller than an essay: a conversation at a toll plaza, a hall that was half the size promised, a stretch of NH where the light did something worth stopping for.

Road notes are for those. They exist so the archive keeps a pulse between the big pieces, and they follow a fixed shape so that two hundred of them still read as one body of work.

The shape

• Where. A town or a stretch of road. Never a precise location for anyone’s home, and never while it is still happening.
• When. A date or a month. Published afterwards, not live.
• What happened. Two hundred words at most. One thing, told properly.
• One frame. A single photograph with a caption that adds something the words did not already say.
• What it cost. Distance, hours, or what had to be rescheduled. This is the part that makes the miles real instead of romantic.

Rules that do not bend

No live location. No route that reveals a routine. No stranger’s face without consent. No number plate unless it has been cleared. Nothing that would embarrass the person who was kind enough to be in the story.

And distance goes into the ledger every time. A road note that adds two hundred kilometres to the record adds two hundred kilometres to the total, or the total means nothing.