No Guardrails At Sunrise

Description

An old muscle car climbs an exposed strip of pavement carved into the mountainside, with nothing separating the driver from a steep descent toward the blue river below. Pines cling to fractured rock, fog occupies the distant valleys, and sunrise reaches across one ridge after another until the mountains seem almost endless.
Yet the car is small enough to nearly disappear inside all that wilderness. That imbalance changes the scene from a simple automotive landscape into a story about deliberately taking the difficult route.
No Guardrails at Sunrise belongs to the moment when the destination matters less than finding out what waits around the next curve.

Margaret Ellery taught driver's education for thirty-four years, and in all that time she never let a student take the canyon road. "Too narrow," she would say. "No shoulders, no guardrails, no second chances." Her students learned to merge, to parallel park, and to brake early on ice. On the first morning of her retirement, she backed her old green coupe out of the garage before dawn, drove past the turn for the highway, and kept climbing. The river glinted far below. Fog filled the valleys. At the highest bend, the sun came over the ridge, and Margaret, who had spent a career telling teenagers to keep both hands on the wheel, rolled down the window.