I was alone in the car when I noticed, which is the wrong way to notice anything.
Something was off about the hillside above the Crystal Springs rest stop. I couldn’t have told you what. It took a mile, maybe more, for the shape of the absence to harden into a fact. The statue was gone.
Twenty-six feet of concrete sprayed over a steel frame. A robed JunÃpero Serra, kneeling, one arm thrust west toward the missions, set above Interstate 280 in the bicentennial year and left there to watch the Peninsula go by. A thing so large and so constant that the eye had stopped registering it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. And then, sometime in the last few months, nothing. A patch of bare earth. No one beside me to ask whether they’d seen it go.
This is what the road does. At highway speed the world beside the freeway is a blur you agree not to examine. The statue stood behind a locked gate, and the people who passed it by the hundred thousand did what the road trains everyone to do. They looked ahead.
It took a walk to catch up with it.