It's always too late.

Segments of a battered American landscape.  Oregon.

Driving along the serpentine and seemingly treacherous Route 101 in the dark.  A light up ahead illuminates a solitary figure.  It’s a roadside worker, holding a stop sign at her side, gesturing with her free hand for me to slow down.  I oblige.  I bring my car to a halt behind a minivan, slip it into park, then turn off the engine and sit idly.  The light, a lone lamp bolted atop a wooden pole driven into the ground, shines weakly around the vehicles and onto the woman road worker’s reflective safe-jacket.  The glint of my leg hair within a beam of the lamp’s light shifts as I shake my leg.  There are no words between the road worker and the car ahead, simply silence.  I bring my camera up to take a photograph of her.  The Pacific ocean crashes to the right of us.  The wind blows quietly across the soft gray road.  I press and release the shutter.