I
know that highway myself
used
to hitch it east-west years ago, when I
taught
high school in a mining town
at
the dead end of a dirt road that ran north
from it
up to
a reservation and then the prefab village
across
the lake
from
the bitten raw stripped dust and giant
rock-gorged machines
there
was a tavern but no stores
so I
had to hitchhike down the road and then
out along
the Yellowhead
another
fifty k to a larger town with a
supermarket
every
two weeks to get food and carry it home in
my
backpack
all
year long in January in the dark at -30°
and June
in the endless daylight
one
cold rainy afternoon I got a ride with
some people
from the reserve
and
we picked up a woman they knew whose face
was
beaten and bloody
she
didn’t show the pain at all, just wanted
to go
into town
occasionally
I’d see girls hitching along there, but
didn’t know
what
was happening to them then, the ghosts
they would
become
that
haunted the darkened, impassive conifers
where
they disappeared
perhaps
they were the older sisters of my students
or
just students themselves
or
they might make it down the highway and
survive for
the moment
to
take a place among the women along East
Hastings
Street in Vancouver
who
left shadows on the barren wet walls along
the bleeding
asphalt
before
they faded away in solitude or were taken
to
places of no return
and
some might have been able to return to
their homes
in the north or west
to
mourn the ones who never reappeared and
forever ask
where they had gone
disappearance
is worse than definite death because the
families and others
never
know for sure no matter how long they wait
forever wondering hoping
and
the women who were once children with
laughing
eyes trying to find their way
are
struck down or vanish unseen the invisible
women
the murdered women
the
lost women the lonely scared brave
trusting women
loved
and never forgotten by the voices asking
where
