Sign On A Highway

The trek from Boulder to the Denver airport...one hundred miles roundtrip... is a far away cry from my...usually...peaceful drive from home to the flats. Once in Denver...the east-west four lane highway in and out of Boulder turns into a six or eight laner...causing life to momentarily take on a new perspective as one is surrounded by ...an endless number of potential road ragers... and as one’s...suddenly tiny... vehicle is boxed in...trapped...by unrelenting eighteened wheeled trucks seemingly oblivious of the ant sized others trying to race alongside them....
This Thursday past...while traveling this too familiar road...to pick up the relatives I had recently dropped off...a massive sign penetrates my attention as I approach one of the underpasses... flashing letters warning ominously..."Ozone alert tomorrow....please refuel in evening..." I want to laugh...but thoughts start to do their whirling...at this...weak...attempt to mitigate the damage done...by all these vehicles...including mine...streaming endlessly to wherever...whenever. I am struck hard by this sign...which I’ve never seen before... reinforcing to me that we are indeed in the environmentally challenged...disrupted... future predicted to us. I cannot help but mention it to my relatives...also mountain residents... when they arrive into the airport...a place where fuel is burned like there will be no tomorrow. After cries of incredulousness...and beginnings of laughter...indicating to me their minds are going the same places mine did...we start to verbalize thoughts...about the unstated rationale for refueling away from the sun’s rays...and the...real meaning...the unsaid ramifications...of those words... harbingers of coming calamity.. slipped as subliminally into commuters’ drifting focuses as the "ozone alert level" words which have begun to scroll across the bottom of the tv screen... becoming part of our everyday life. Are they trying to tell us that maybe we shouldn’t be in the outside...prepare us for the time perhaps soon when ...we won’t be able to breathe...go out of doors...enjoy life...without seeing...using...oxygen suppliers on street corners...like we’ve heard about in places not so far away..................whether the sun’s intense heat...and the itching of our skin...accelerated these past couple of years here in Colorado...will worsen............if the old.or infirm and eventually all... will have to stay confined for days on end...in artificially circulated air environments...like some of our relatives closer to the earth’s poles do now................. As our thoughts wander off...into other directions...I know that the next time my...ozone shield eating... ride needs to...unfortunately... be refueled......I may wait till...the evening...just in case...it helps...