As summer winds down, I think of vacations past, of long drives along unfamiliar roads, of pulling into a place we’ve never been before. The western United States and Canada are good for this. Endless highways, scenery that never stops. A few days in this landscape and the shoulders drop, the headache goes away. Something relaxes in me that I hadn’t known was tight.

Funny thing: After I write this post I read (on Metro) from a chapter in Marianne Wiggins’ book The Shadow Catcher called “Lights Out for the Territory,” these words: “The drive had all these syncopations, then — the percussion of the asphalt road, the alternating rhythms of the landscape braiding, like convergent channels of a river, through divergent threads of time.”

Yeah, something like that!