Weekend getaway in Kamloops. A place with a name from an English attempt at an Indigenous word. Like so many places here and probably around the world.

Plenty of options for highway travel. Scenic routes, fast routes, routes that may or may not be flooded or on fire depending on the time of year and how the planet feels.

Some highways follow trade routes that have existed for longer than the Western conscience can remember. Other roads were carved out using dynamite, will-power, slave-power, and hubris. Some highways are named for the sappers who maimed the natural landscape to shape it according to our wants and needs.

There’s more bugs than ever before. The evidence is all over the front windshield. The wiper blades don’t get them off. It’s a mixture of the heat and the impact leaving behind a glue like substance of different colours depending on what lived it’s last moment there.

Stopping at a gas station to fill up and clear the window when I see a leg twitching along the edge of the windshield. There’s a back end and some legs and they’re desperately trying to escape. I try to gently lift the rubber and help this big bug out. It can still get away if I do this right.

I pull out the bottom half of some creature that looks like a large moth. It’s legs still trying to run. It’s not going anywhere.

I look further up the windshield. I see the top half of this creature trying to escape from there. I go through the same process only this time I know better than it what the future holds.

It has a moment of what it thinks is freedom and then I crush it instantly, hoping it is painless. It helps me even if it does nothing for the bug.

Whatever this was it was large and it’s insides were gray and yellow. I find myself in a moody atmospheric horror movie or thriller looking at the aftermath of some gruesome massacre.

As I survey the carnage it dawns on me that we call them windshields, and wiper blades. It’s all very battle themed. Maybe that’s fitting for the violent way the buggy then the car violated the landscape and now violates the air and skies. Fitting for its impact on cultures and peoples colonized, including the colonizers who are themselves colonized. Fitting for what I’ve done to these bugs who were out enjoying being what they were, until they weren’t.

Either way I’m going to need a car wash. My efforts are as futile as that little critter in two trying to survive and not knowing it was already dead.

The world isn’t cold and lonely. Not anymore. It’s hot and humid and smokey and on fire, and lonely.