Running across a copy of Jack Kerouac's most famous novel in the used paperbacks bin of a local bookstore recently reminded me of a painting that appeared several years ago* in the New Yorker by one of the magazine's regular artists, Istvan Banyai. This small picture made a big impression, and the feeling it stimulated has lingered with me ever since.

Anchored by the blank face of a full moon, Banyai's composition in pink, white, and shades of gray captures the essence of the contemporary American road. It contains all the elements of traveling the four lane after dark -- loneliness, isolation, and the feeling of being lost in an alien landscape.

The perfectly balanced late-night composition supposedly shows Interstate 60  heading east, and the big yellow billboard advertising the Durango (southern Colorado) Orchestra suggests the possibility that the painting is the portrait of an actual geographical location on the road. The most striking feature of this landscape, however, is its ubiquity; it could be anywhere, although the bleak, empty landscape suggests somewhere west of the Mississippi.

The picture's elements are horrifyingly inevitable: the long, squat Wal-Mart store, a little further along the Golden Arches atop a long pole, and the semi-truck carrying "FOOD" approaching the freeway on-ramp from the left. An isolated pink sedan follows a white vantruck down the lonely nighttime highway, and way in the distance, the mandatory police cruiser with lights flashing, although you can't tell which way he's going. I've been lost in this landscape many times. It's a disorienting place where nothing seems real, an alien environment where you're afraid to stop for fear of encountering strange beings. The worst thing about it is that it's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Mostly it's nowhere.

*June 25, 2007