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Show -204 felt naked, soft, stripped of my clam's shell. Bits of landscape, seen through the windows for a second only, took on strange shapes and were informed by occult meanings. A brown pond on which two white ducks amiably floated; a queer-cut wooden Gothic house pointing its turrets and fretwork at the sky; in the middle of a brown field a grav boulder big as a cabin, the furrows bending to run around it. We rolled on in the shadow but these things were outside the blurry edge; they were touched by the sun, bits of glory that flashed in my brain, explanations of the past and portents of the future, could I but interpret them. "I love long trips," Fancy said. "Tell me about coming East." "I followed my nose. I drove all day long at forty-five miles an hour, which was as fast as the truck would go; at night I stretched out an old piece of canvas and slept in the back." I can recite states: Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. And states of mind: anxiety, boredom, doubt, euphoria, melancholy, anger, despair, excitement. The prairies in summer were endless deserts of corn, wheat, soybeans; like any desert, they were at the same time terrible and beautiful. I drove at forty-five miles an hour through country so featureless and flat that I and my truck were the tallest things |