A scenic drive goes nowhere. This is part of its appeal. It cuts through space and it crosses vast expanses, but it doesn’t connect towns or serve any real practical purpose; it exists to reveal landscape.

The Blue Ridge Parkway goes nowhere. This black ribbon of a road unwinds across fields and mountains. A road is a thing, but a drive is an activity, something undertaken.

White and brown signs mark the road’s entrances and exits. These signs depict the silhouette of a mountain and a tree whose branches unfold in tiers. The world as a cutout. These signs also outline a driver’s choice: NORTH or SOUTH. But neither direction seems to signify what lies ahead.

And it’s difficult to determine when to get on and off the road. Conversations with friends along for the ride go something like this:

“Should we get off here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, do you want to keep going for a bit?”

“Sure.”

“We could keep going for a while.”

“Okay.”

“There will be another place to get off.”

“Sounds good.”

“Lots of options.”

“Perfect.”

Although scenic overlooks pop up every few miles along the Parkway, I think it’s best to see the mountains from a moving car. This keeps the peaks from settling into stasis; they can’t remain fixed, even if they might want to. Sometimes they look like an old-fashioned, painted Hollywood backdrop. The Blue Ridge is already a metaphor, an impossible color.

During snowstorms, bolted gates close off the Parkway and make the road look wild, as if everything beyond is dangerous and forbidden. A parallel two-lane highway runs alongside the more inhabited stretches in Virginia, and in snowstorms, the locked gates force you onto this road, and as you drive it, you see the Parkway right there, next to you — not far off, but off-limits.

I drive the Parkway to feel static, because sometimes I like to feel that I’m not going anywhere. And one day, I found another kind of stasis along this road. An arrested place. An inn in the form of three red cabooses on a sloping hillside, just off the Parkway in Fancy Gap, Virginia.

Each had a deck that grounded it in space and proclaimed its house-ness, its removal from the realm of motion. Driving up to the cabooses, I thought of summer camp, where we all used to sing “The Gambler” in a bat-filled barn in the mountains of Northern California.

On a warm summer’s eve
On a train bound for nowhere
I met up with a gambler
We were both too tired to sleep…

We didn’t know who these men smoking cigarettes were, or why they were on a train bound for nowhere, but at night we lay in the hay and sang this song like an incantation. I thought, and maybe the others did, too, that it communicated some sort of profound adult wisdom I might understand one day.

And now I had found a train that was bound for nowhere.

I sat on the deck of my caboose and drank bourbon while my dog ran across the tan hills, which in the setting sun resembled a Wyeth painting. Geese honked in the distance, the sound violent and determined, like a warning.

“Caboose” used to refer to the cook room or kitchen on the deck of a man-of-war or an oven or fireplace erected on land. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that it came to mean the last car on a freight train. A thing that was usually, but not always, red.

Until several decades ago, every freight train in America had a caboose. Sometimes they housed the conductor’s and brakemen’s offices. Some had cupolas where staff sat and inspected the train from above the roof. Others were equipped with bay windows that allowed a view up the side of the train, all the way from the end to the front.

Mine had a bay window. Inside, the bed was pushed up against the far wall, near where the train once was. The windows were small. Of course. The décor was simple: a kitchenette, a bed, a black leather office chair and an oversized Jacuzzi bathtub. Outside, there was a deck, where I sat for hours and watched the light change and then disappear altogether.

Cabooses helped train crews to see dangers that might lie farther down the track. To look ahead. Those in the caboose had a privileged vantage point. The train moved them forward through space, but it was also the object of their gaze. They kept watch.

A caboose without a train can’t see into the future.

The geese honked late into the night, and as I lay in bed, I wondered if I would dream of this caboose traveling through marked and mapped space and into the realm of the prophetic, where what is anticipated comes to be.