Three miles on this path, with no light beyond the scope of our high beams, no moonlight, no starlight, just trees and ablackness so heavy that we both stopped talking and stretched our necks until our foreheads were almost touching the windshield, trying to make sense of the tarry vastness around us.
The imagery was of a lonely freighter out there somewhere in the dark, with Winchell's disembodied voice floating out of the blackness, like a rumor, a message in a bottle.