He was goin to formulate this post around that Talking Heads song but he couldn’t understand it so he didn’t…

Crossing over the pass at the end of the road takes you down into the valley of Yoshinogawa City.  It’s a convoluted little road and the government is doing a lot of repair work to try and make it a little easier and quicker to drive.  Thus far they have created a wonderful set of switchback turns in gleeming black tarmac and pearly, polished concrete…
He’d seen this road on google maps and liked the way it just faded into the forest (red arrow).  He often thought about things fading.  The weight of progression, pervasive but difficult to see, like the wild animals that live in the forest.

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The road is still surplus and closed to traffic.  It is split into two sections by a wildly overgrown vegetative patch that the man imagined would make overtaking hazardous.

Passing through the dried grass he experienced a familiar sensation, that of artificial margins and precise yet unrestrained natural growth.  He considered for a moment where the feeling originated but the gentle swaying of the pine trees and rapid flurry of snow disturbed his thoughts.

A few metres further down the superelevation at the bend is obvious.  The road is marked with the dry residue of rainwater runoff and nothing else.  Over the barriers either side, 100 metres below the man sees an icy mountain river.  He holds his hat to his head as he leans over barely touching the barrier.  The atmosphere and radical perspective disorientate him and the compulsion to experience the agony of falling is powerful.  He carefully backs away from the edge and continues along the normal crown of the road.

The road terminates in earth and scrub, as he anticipated it would.  ‘They must dig here’ he said aloud, laughing.  ‘They must dig a hole here’ he said again this time to himself.  Pivoting on his heels he walks back the same way noting how fragile the bridge seemed now.  It has a pointless strength, bravado.  Useless ambition.  Perhaps, he thought, there might also be a purity and an innocence about it too.

This is not a road, this is a kind of faceless monument, a piece of unresolved sculpture…  If he was the kind of person that spit on the ground he would have spat over the edge.  Instead, he climbed up the concrete embankment crassly and walked away.