11/10/26
Between Fort Collins and Laramie, in northwestern Colorado and southwestern Wyoming, sits sixty-five miles of asphalt and paint, resulting in what they call Highway 287, a highway that stretches all the way down to Oklahoma, if, you know, you want to go to Oklahoma. This stretch of highway is also known as the worst fucking stretch of road anyone’s ever driven. I hope you and your loved ones will never ever have to drive from Fort Collins to Laramie, or vice versa, any time for the rest of your lives. And why would you? Yeah, don’t do it.
The road is really like any other highway you’ve ever driven on except it’s not, it’s a death trap. It’s elevated, it’s exposed. Imagine a highway that is designed like railroad tracks, up high for everyone to see, sloping at the sides, its emergency shoulder lanes crumbling and full of debris if they’re available at all. There’s signs for fireworks (on-sale in Cheyenne) and plenty of JESUS SAVES billboards. Yeah, Jesus saves alright, except on Highway 287. Here’s who drives on the road: big ass 18-wheelers with little regard for your life, college kids who don’t know better, drunk divorcees of both genders doing 105 mph while barreling back to Denver after a weekend at the casinos, tractor trailers doing 45 and sipping their piping hot coffee. And you and your mom. It’s built for everyone and, therefore, no one. And the highway snakes through some of the windiest parts of the country. Look it up. Everyone thinks Chicago and the great plains are the windiest parts of the country. They’re windy! But not as windy as Wyoming and the downslope wind sheer coming off the Rocky Mountains. Highway 287 is the windiest fucking place on earth. If you need to learn to fly a kite, you know where to go.
Did I mention? Highway 287 between Fort Collins and Laramie is dangerous to drive and you shouldn’t ever, ever do it. It’s literally called “The Highway of Death.” Consider:
2001: A drunk driver killed eight University of Wyoming students
2008: Two killed in head-on collision
2024: Three Wyoming students killed
2025: Two killed in awful accident when two drivers (one wasted) burned to death after a collision
There are many many more that I don’t have room to include, but it goes on and on like this and will probably continue. I have driven this stretch of 287 twice. Once, in November of 2003, when I had just turned eighteen, we drove to Laramie for a college football game. Stupid. There were five of us in all. We had a great time at the game but the drive home was the worst two hours of my life. Fifty-mile-an-hour winds, hail, snow, trucks passing us at 80 miles per hour, I was screaming, we were all screaming. I slammed my breaks and the gas, back and forth for what seemed like all night. I cannot believe we survived to tell the tale. We should have been killed. Almost exactly eighteen years after that trip, I did it again, this time going to and from Saratoga, Wyoming, to bury my dad, if you can call it that — we scattered his ashes in a river up that way. The drive was better, it was August, but I still suspected being shoved off the road by an 18-wheeler on the way home, how poetic it would have been, having buried my dad just hours earlier to die on that god forsaken road.
Why bring all this up? I haven’t lived out that way in many years and almost certainly never will again. One thing’s for sure: I will never drive that drive again. But last weekend I couldn’t help but think of 287 as I drove from New York City to Hudson, up in Hudson Valley. To get there, we took a highway that someone decided to call Sprain Brook Parkway.
The name sounds lovely. It is not a lovely drive. Once you fight your way up through the city and muscle around every lunatic in Westchester, you find yourself gunning up on a winding, 75-mile highway with no shoulder at all (sounds familiar!), navigating a shadowy, tree-covered maze that allows maybe fifty feet of visibility at all times. And when it’s pitch black out, like it was last Friday? Forget it, you cannot see a fucking thing except oncoming headlights and the half dozen full-legged deer peaking around the guardrails, threatening to jump through your windshield and cut your weekend getaway short. The highway posts its speed limit of 55 mph. Yeah, uh-huh. You’re telling motorists to abide by a 55 mile per hour speed limit on a Friday night? Why don’t you just tell your dog not to eat that piece of pizza you’ve left on the floor? Why don’t you tell your fifteen year old son not to look up Pornhub?
I hate all this shit and makes me never want to go anywhere that isn’t on a train or plane for the rest of my life. How have we let it come to this? Seventy-five miles an hour, twisting up and down mountains, where one wrong move (by me or another) or one slippery spot means the death of me, my wife, our baby, and the dog, and probably six other people. See above, re: Highway 287. Or, actually, let’s let Sprained Ankle Parkway tell its own story:
May 17, 2026: One person was killed in a single-car crash in Yonkers, just north of Tuckahoe Road. [1]
October 22, 2026: A 20-year-old man from West Harrison was struck and killed on the northbound Sprain Brook Parkway in Greenburgh after exiting his disabled Volvo. [1, 2]
May 20, 2024: A multi-vehicle crash on the southbound parkway just north of Interstate 287 resulted in one fatality and multiple injuries. [1, 2]
Like 287, there’s many many more trips on Sprain that ended up at the funeral home. A manic, two-lane highway full of eighteen-wheelers pushing triple digit speeds and teenagers pushing double digit BACs with tractors steered by old men who just can’t see like they used to. Like 287: you build a road for everyone and you build it for no one. The half-dozen crosses and ribbons hanging on fences and road signs tell you that not everyone who attempt the journey lived to tell the story.
The sight of every one of those crosses and ribbons cut me every time. Right there, I think, in that moment, at that spot, a life ended, all the hopes and dreams (or not, but so what), dead, gone, over. All the laughs, texts, homework assignments and basketball shots made and missed, girls kissed and boys cried over, all in the past. Who were their parents? Their daughters? Their neighbors? All so we could get from one place to another, whenever we wanted, as fast as we wanted, however we wanted and in whatever paint color or lift job we wanted. Permission granted to all with a pulse and passable eyesight, at sixteen years old, not barely more than a decade after we learned to walk and talk, to drink and text and drive and smash each other to pieces and ask not for answers but to trust the Lord’s process. More than a dozen dead in just the last few years on Sprain. A grandma and her son and his daughter, four, on their way back home for dinner. A farmer nine days from retirement. A grocery store clerk from Albany escaping drugs and a wicked husband. Again and again and again. And to this we say, give us more. Give us more.