September 16

Taxicabs, concrete, duffel bags, wait. Pleading voices, trained voices, long lines, go. Pricey beer, bad food, newspapers, wait. Intercom, heavy bags, shoulders sore, stand. Small seat, flight attendant, turbine scream, takeoff.

All the flights were delayed, all the seats were in the middle but it was good to be traveling again. I didn’t want to talk to the folks back home. To study, to watch, to move without casting lines back to the places from which I had come. Let spiders knit the world together. I want to see the world’s disjuncts. Do they exist?

Tonight I find myself south of Polaris, west of Orion, north of a shooting star and east of Price, Utah. The yellow lights of a small Utah town shimmer below me and the night is silent, humbly silent except for the automobiles passing on US Route 6. It is easy to resent them, but I remember that only an hour ago Squatter and I were on the same road.

I met Lynn on the plane from Chicago and we flew through the night sky together. She said that back home in England there were children who had never seen the Milky Way, who did not know that it could be glimpsed in the night sky if only one would substitute the bulging yellow halo around London for the glimmering lantern lights of a small Utah town. I said that is a shame. The Milky Way is beautiful. But then there are many beautiful things in the universe that I have never glimpsed, of whose existence I am unaware, and I shame no one for them.

Novel places, foreign news, talking people, go.