Seattle, Washington
We walk sixteen thousand steps in shopping bags and Patagonia rain jackets through the never-rain, using Google maps to navigate your hometown. I talk incessantly about my lost life while you take us down wrong turns, saying, You will get there. At a paper maps store, we pull out drawers of flattened Earth. Of streets in Seville and Oslo, as if life can be laid out and easily navigated. More than once I say, Wouldn’t it be nice to travel there.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.”
-Norman MacLean
1.
On a Pacific Northwest wild-fire summer evening, Emmett and I drive the babysitter while the edges of the world burn. She’s chatty and optimistic about fall classes, but I’m distracted by the sun, which is Crayola-Orange, perfect circle, unnatural and eerie. The sky is a muted monotony of ash, like gray-brown construction paper. She prattles away, while I think about being trapped in a naughty child’s apocalyptic crayon drawing.
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