It’s a big country, a fact I learned from the back seat of a station wagon when I was a kid. To land somewhere exciting, you packed your things, climbed into the car and watched the miles tick away. Only 45 more till Joplin, 62 more till Tucumcari and, after what seemed like an eternity but was only four days, we reached San Bernardino, California. 

 The fact that we’d driven there didn’t make it any less exotic. In fact, I always marveled that by simply sticking with it — by putting in the miles, so to speak — we could make our way to a completely new place with orange groves and movie stars and the big blue Pacific lapping at the land. 

How different it will be tomorrow, when we wake up, taxi to Dulles and fly to the other side of the country — not just the horizontal other but the diagonal other, the Pacific Northwest — in all of five hours.

It will be none the less exotic for us having arrived there on a big silver bird. There will be dark firs and steep hills and that same big blue Pacific. But the amazement I feel being on the other side of the country will harken back to those early trips, to those interminable but (come to find out) essential drives through dessert and plain. They taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.