Elsewhere along the highway, other limits --

Hanging in shades of neon from dusk to dusk,

The signs of people who know how to take

Pleasure in places where it seems unlikely:

New kind of places, the "overdeveloped" strips

With their arousing, vacant-minded jumble;

Or garbagey lake-towns, and the tourist-pits

Where crimes unspeakably bizarre come true

To astonish countries older, or more savage...

As though the rapes and murders of the French

Or Indonesians were less inventive than ours,

Less goofy than those happenings that grow

Like air-plants -- out of nothing, and alone.

They make us parents want to keep our children

Locked up, safe even from the daily papers

That keep the grisly record of that frontier

Where things unspeakable happen along the highways.

In today's paper, you see the teen-aged girl

From down the street; camping in Oregon

At the far point of a trip across the country,

Together with another girl her age,

They suffered and survived a random evil.

An unidentified, youngish man in jeans

Aimed his car off the highway, into the park

And at their tent (apparently at random)

And drove it over them once, and then again;

And then got out, and struck at them with a hatchet

Over and over, while they struggled; until

From fear, or for some other reason, or none,

He stopped; and got back into his car again

And drove off down the night-time highway. No rape,

No robbery, no "motive." Not even words,

Or any sound from him that they remember.

The girl still conscious, by crawling, reached the road

And even some way down it; where some people

Drove by and saw her, and brought them both to help,

So doctors could save them -- barely marked.

                                                                                                                You see

Our neighbor's picture in the paper: smiling,

A pretty child with a kerchief on her head

Covering where the surgeons had to shave it.

You read the story, and in a peculiar tone --

Factual, not unfeeling, like two policemen --

Discuss it with your sister. You seem to feel

Comforted that it happened far away,

As in a crazy place, in Oregon:

For me, a place of wholesome reputation;

For you, a highway where strangers go amok,

As in the universal provincial myth

That sees, in every stranger, a mad attacker...

(And in one's victims, it may be, a stranger).

Excerpted from An Explanation of America by Robert Pinsky, copyright (c) 1979 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of author and the Princeton University Press.