Half-way from Portland to Montana, with a benign misadventure in the Midwest
And after a prolonged send-off of plangent well-wishing and affections, I find myself wending my way down a nameless road, an immense old-growth forest hunched over me as though it were straining to preserve its angle of repose and thus avoid eroding on top of me. I’m driving a moped. It’s raining and the sun is setting, the darkening verdure expanding to edge out the already attenuated light seeping through the canopy. I’m bound for Montana, and I know this in the way one knows about the impending future in dreams, not as occurrences one can foresee by drawing inferences from preceding events, but in that gnostic, intimate way of knowing that always outclasses the empiricism of waking life. Similarly, I know that I am expected in Montana in an unreasonable amount of time. I can’t be traveling any faster than 25 mph, which bodes poorly for my prospects. Of course, I may as well not concern myself with covering a certain distance (600 miles) within a certain, expedited timescale,