They say ghosts are the spirits of people who are dealing with loose ends. Urgent unfinished business can make any death untimely and spawn a haunting.

Based on this theory, if my wife died tomorrow, I believe she would feel the need to come back as my driving instructor. She would haunt every car I drive. Even my rentals would come equipped with a ghostly, sarcastic GPS system with an intimate knowledge of all my weaknesses.

“Whyyyyy didn’t youuuuu ahhhhpgrade?” she would moan/nag.

“Whaaaat are youuuu doing? Youuuuu shouuld haaave turrrrrrrned therrrre.” (That one is my favorite—“You should have turned there.” Gee, thank you for withholding that information until it was “criticism.” Two blocks ago, it would have been “advice.”)

Another favorite? “Waaaatch wheeeeere yourrrrrr’e goooooing!” Of course, even after death, she would say this right after she pointed out something of interest: “Ahhhh, loooook aaaat thaaat pooooony!”

She’s right, though. I do tend to look at everything but the road when I drive. And who can blame me? Have you seen the road lately? I have. I started a “career” as a stand-up comedian in 1998. Most of my gigs were in small towns without airports, so for the next ten years I drove about 75,000 miles each year. Therefore, with the authority of experience, I can say that the road is boring. It’s gray, flat, and of uniform width with several billion, white, dashed lines identical in length and uniformly spaced. Occasionally the road narrows down to two lanes of opposing traffic separated by yellow lines—and that’s where things occasionally get pretty exciting. Still, for the most part, our interstates are unbearably boring compared to everything going on around them.

Take a valley I have often driven through on my way to Denver. A mile wide, air full of hawks, maybe an eagle, and with a long, winding line of half-dead cottonwoods and deep orange willows all sidled up to a river like pigs to a trough. A river with a billion fish and water both turbulent and still, reflecting and refracting light from a naked sun in a sky as blue as Cyndi Lauper’s eye shadow.

Naturally I’m going to think about being down by the river. At its edge. Turning over rocks, panning for gold, smelling mud, finding a body. Checking my traps and scanning the current for fish. Peering into the brush for deer, elk, bear, cougars, and Indians. Rifle in hand, knife at the ready. Every nerve spent serving my survival.

Instead I’m driving. My nerves are shot sitting behind the wheel, mulling over joke premises while looking for punch lines and checking mirrors instead of traps. I am consciously trying to shut out the beautiful scenery so I can scan, constantly scan, not down rivers for fish but behind billboards and at on-ramps for cops—uniformed people armed with guns, tasers, pads, and pens. People who scold me, raise my car insurance rates, and sternly wave me past the scenes of horrific accidents, all calm and composed like people working in their yard. The cops are at home on the road.

I’m not at home on the road. I’m between everything I know and everything that matters to me, urgently crawling along at 85 miles an hour in a machine I don’t understand, like a spirit in limbo with unfinished business ahead and behind.

When dark settles in, and my headlights let me see only a few hundred yards into my immediate future, I always get scared. Yet, mercifully, even that fear gets boring, the jitters settle into complacency, and I calmly begin to take in all the glowing yellow warning signs. Soon they are simply depictions of ways for me to die out here: Hey, look, I could get done in by a leaping trophy buck or crushed by a falling rock! Wow, I might slide off the wet road or slam into a cow—or maybe both at the same time! Or I could simply drift off the road while day dreaming—or literally dreaming. Dying alone in your sleep has a whole new meaning now that we’ve entered the age of the automobile.

On the bright side, a high percentage of these various ways in which I might transcend the earthly sphere are not slow and painful. On the dark side, they all occur “out here,” on the road, far from home in the land of unfinished business. If I die out here, a haunting would definitely be in order.

I suppose if I died out on the road, I would probably haunt my own funeral. I would want more than anything to be in a room full of people who knew all my jokes and me. And I would actually love, more than the laughter of strangers, the sound of my wife’s nagging voice delivering her line with perfect timing, under her breath, tinged with irritation and I hope some grief—a bearable amount of grief: “I told you so.”

Bengt Washburn

Dettenhausen, Germany