My partner and I are at the airport en route to Maine to visit friends. I have been looking forward to this trip, but right now I am in a bad mood, which has to do with finding myself in an airport. Everything about Terminal 2 rubs me the wrong way, starting with the word “terminal,” moving on to how the structures around the concessions look more permanent than the terminal that contains them, then to the fact that even elderly people are wearing play clothes. Grow up! But the true source of my distress is that all this reminds me of the futility of travel. Of course there is lots to see, but it’s also true that it doesn’t really matter where you go, there really isn’t such a thing as “getting away,” and that, wherever you might go, an equally adventurous choice would be to stay home.
Trying to shift out of this dyspeptic attitude, I note the lack of hurry around me. If savored in the right way, an airport can put one in mind of a city park on a warm day. In an airport, everyone has all the time in the world, unbadgered by purpose. After a while I begin to notice beauty, even of the materials out of which the concessions with their branding décor are constructed—polished cherrywood with handsome brass to denote a bar, for example. I even begin to see beauty in people: for example, a group right now getting onto an elongated golf cart that serves as an internal transport vehicle. The scene is choreographic, an overall unity of motion in gorgeous tension with individual gestures, as in a baroque painting. An intent energy in each movement—leg shoving off from the floor, arm reaching forward for the back of a seat—gives the whole an arresting grace. Bare limbs as revealed by the play clothes enhances the effect. I am charmed by my observations. Just a moment ago I felt as if this environment were sucking up my life and now I am swimming in time deliciously. This kind of switchbacking mood is typical of my experience in airports.
My study of our landscape has been pursued in places where I am at home—the known place now offering a riskier adventure than the unknown place, because only when we know a place can we really begin to grasp how strange all place has become. But I have also traveled in the ordinary sense in my studies—gone places—often on short domestic flights. That is how I began to realize that airports themselves were perhaps more important in their way than my destinations, or at least in themselves were revelatory of the world in which we live, as was the plane itself and the experience of being airborne. It never ceases to amaze me how indifferent air passengers are to the view out the window. They read books or are absorbed in computer screens as if the world were not being laid out beneath them. In Landscape into Art, a history of landscape painting, the art historian Kenneth Clark notes that Petrarch, the Renaissance Italian poet, was the first person to record climbing a mountain in order to see the view. Petrarch also recorded that, after getting to the top and taking it all in for a few minutes, he opened the book he had brought with him. On planes I, too, but only eventually, open my book.
Domestic flights are of various altitudes, but there is a classic height of around ten thousand feet, from which the scenes on the ground are unabstracted: trees, roads, houses—the human landscape—are the main thing. But as you get higher, all that begins to look superfluous, minor, a covering overlaid on geological formations that shift and ease themselves like a single giant who is careless of the thin blanket on his body as he tenses and relaxes according to his needs and whims. From the perspective of higher altitudes, geological time seems to be far more dramatic and important than human time. The creases in mountains, the river swings: it’s these that are impressive while human endeavor seems oblivious of the drama in which it is set. Moving vehicles crawl blindly on roads. Towns look like a project left behind in a sandbox at the end of the day. Even the plane itself, floating effortlessly, can have a toylike quality. At lower levels, however, there is an only slightly sublimated sense of human struggle in the view. I am remembering watching the shadow of a plane in which I was sitting at a height of ten thousand feet: a small, thick cross haltingly creeping across the roughness of a harvested cornfield. Man-made textures from this height can be emotional.
If you are not looking out the window, the plane can seem to be not even crawling: to be in stasis, even when bumping about on air. When I notice this I usually think of the term “willing suspension of disbelief,” which Coleridge coined for what we do when we enter into a fictional world in a book. What keeps this lumbering, obviously heavy thing in what feels like a shuddering, barely proceeding state aloft? I wonder: why doesn’t it just drop out of the sky like a stone? This could be one reason people don’t much look out plane windows. The manifest heaviness of the plane contrasts with the extreme dinkiness of most plane interiors. Over time, the synthetic materials of these interiors seem to have become vitiated, as if trying to be as close to nothing as possible. Those of us who fly coach have also noticed the gradual constriction of space to a point where it almost seems more symbolic than actual, or at best a token, as if under these conditions of flight the body itself has become a fiction: you suspend it. This internal contrast of heaviness to dinkiness in turn stands in contrast to the magisterial views. One is in steerage, just one notch above a stowaway, in an environment that is like nothing so much as throwaway packaging, but with a godlike perspective.
All air trips are both banal and fantastic: there is a sameness about them that causes them to merge in the mind. One of mine stands out, however. On a flight back from Japan, the entire population of the plane having fallen asleep as if on cue immediately after the meal, I was alone in my tiny pool of light, with all the time in the world to record my experiences of Japan in a notebook. I love to write on planes at night because, unless you have children with you, your life is completely suspended. There is nothing much likely to happen to interrupt your thoughts. It’s a question whether being on a plane is really an experience—even when looking out the window it can be as if you don’t quite exist. It’s this lack of intervening experience that makes a plane the perfect place to try to draw real experiences together, for example, memories of the gardens of Kyoto, thoughts about the Japanese tea ceremony, reflections on Hiroshima, and to see if words will draw these subjects into relation to one another. We were very deep into the flight. All the little plastic lids had been drawn down over the portholes: there was no world other than the interior of the plane, from which I had disappeared into my notebook. But suddenly I was jostled back into my surroundings by a hushed hubbub toward the rear. It was time to stretch my legs anyway. Getting up, I saw a group of stewardesses clustered tightly around a porthole. What could possibly interest stewardesses in a view from a plane at thirty-six thousand feet over the Pacific at night? Two and three at a time, they took turns leaning down to the porthole, fannies pointing upward, then giving way to those eagerly waiting behind them.
I traversed toward this scene and immediately they made way for me, unable to tell me in English what for. In an excess of tidiness one of the stewardesses had slid the little plastic lid down behind her, and I would remember that lid later, so light, so inconsiderable, so of a piece with the artificiality of the interior of the plane. It moved up lightly at the touch of my finger, and there, below me—and not so very far below—were the snow-clad mountains of Alaska, crisply, solemnly visible under a full moon. Then it happened: irregular disco pulse, aurora borealis. Even now my heart stops a little when I think of it: the flagrancy. The mountains were dematerialized by the pulses, but in between the moonlight was so clear and the mountains so close that one could see into the snowy passes, could imagine having trekked into them, finally earning with risk and discomfort this spectacular intimate display of the world on its own. But looking at all this with my fanny up in the air was quickly uncomfortable. Anyway, in a sense I had seen it all in five seconds. Actually I think it was hard to look long: to occupy the perspective of being above not only the mountains, but even the northern lights. Turning away, I saw that the stewardesses had gone back to their duties. The banality of the plane was a relief. I reached out with my little finger and closed the lid.
The enclosure of sky roads is like a worldwide interstate, a superstructure that makes of the great outdoors an interior, in which all architecture, but an airport especially, because of its relation to the sky roads, is a room inside a room. Sometimes the spatial imagination of the agrarian age helps me understand our conditions today. The sameness of airports is like the sameness of Catholic churches the world over, manifesting a contiguous encompassing spiritual space in relation to which normal life in the landscape—streaming highways, flat-roofed factories, rooftops poking through trees—is secondary, only half real.
The first photograph in which the curve of the Earth could be seen was taken from a V-2 rocket fired during World War II from White Sands Missile Range, which went higher than any plane had gone at the time. The Germans had fired such a rocket first, but I found no evidence of photographs taken. With the development of the jet engine in the 1950s, test pilots and military pilots began to fly routinely at fifty thousand feet. Missiles, as they were developed, flew higher and higher, but with only cameras, not the human eye. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was dropped from a propeller plane at a height of thirty-two thousand feet. As thermonuclear weapons were developed, intercontinental ballistic missiles became the principal delivery system. Only test missiles were actually fired, but many missiles complete with warheads were kept in silos, in both the United States and the Soviet Union, and also in other countries, aimed and ready to fire worldwide on a few moments’ notice. Those carefully planned trajectories, arcing from the ground, out of the atmosphere and back in, enclosed the ever elaborating sky roads, including the very high trajectories of test pilots, in a kind of phantom architecture beyond the atmosphere, establishing a new outer edge of our human landscape.
Within this enclosure of supersonic speeds there was still a relationship between distance and time, indeed several different layers, nestled within one another successively, until, down on the ground, at least for a person on foot, distance and time, and indeed place, seemed to be as they had always been. The missiles were no exception, but the speed at which nuclear war might break out seemed to nullify the continuum with time and distance as we experience it normally.
The gyroscope of sky roads continued to grow inside the missile-trajectory enclosure, thickening over time, its angled connections to Earth looping down in clusters in a formation that was repeated on a larger scale by the trajectories of missiles, with the points of arrival matching the most popular arrival destinations of airlines: the great cities of the world. But even as this outer enclosure was being completed, the carriers on the sky roads were propeller planes; and many travelers still crossed the ocean on ships. In 1957, Americans were shocked to learn that “the Russians,” as we called the Soviets, had launched Sputnik, a satellite that went into orbit around the Earth, outside the missile trajectories. While satellite technology became a natural aid to nuclear warfare by missile, the launching of Sputnik inaugurated a welcome sublimation of the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union into the arena of space exploration.
Sputnik was the first piece of what is today our commonplace outermost enclosure—the exostructure of the information age, satellites with their basketry of signals that extend our eyes and ears, our voices and our proliferating messages and thoughts, enclosing our planet and all our doings on it. But it was actually the space race that geared up after Sputnik. In 1962, John Glenn, an actual human being, went into orbit around the Earth, upstaging Sputnik, mere artifact that it was. When he returned, a Senate committee, hungry to be amazed—perhaps to justify the cost—pressed him for details. But Glenn said that what he had seen was little different from the view of a test pilot at fifty thousand feet—in other words, earth orbit was really just a natural extension of the sky roads to someone familiar with the territory. Still, the horizon of the planet was different, Glenn said, for from orbit “the blackness of space contrasts vividly with the brightness of Earth,” and the horizon was curved, though that was not so exciting to him, of course, even if more pronounced than what he had seen routinely as a pilot. It was other sights, ephemeral, aesthetic that amazed him. “The horizon itself is a brilliant blue,” Glenn said, also telling of a kind of snow of particles of a greenish fireflylike color that would swarm about his spacecraft as he flew toward darkness, facing backward. At first he had thought he was looking at stars.
Apollo 8, which took off to orbit the moon in 1968, achieved the definitive leap out of the context of the Earth into the context of space. On the way out, most of the windows of the spaceship became clouded and smeared by a sealing compound that had partially decomposed in the vacuum of space. Two forward-looking windows were clear, but the astronauts could not see the moon toward which they were traveling at five thousand miles per hour through these windows, because it was hidden in the glare of the sun. So were the stars. This brightly lit environment was, paradoxically, black. When the spaceship rolled, however, they could see the Earth momentarily: each time it was much smaller. At sixty-seven thousand miles, astronaut Jim Lovell could stretch out his arm and cover the Earth with his thumb. At this point, the brightness of the planet had faded sufficiently that it could be captured on film and transmitted. But because they were looking directly at Antarctica with Cape Horn poking in, an unfamiliar perspective, they couldn’t figure out what they were seeing. When they got it, Bill Anders considerately took the photo hanging upside down, so that Cape Horn came in from the top, making the image more intelligible to earthlings. People were now looking at the planet with a surrogate eye out in space, and you could say that the planet was looking back at them. On televisions in living rooms all over the world, the planet was looking at itself. Indeed, it looked a lot like a blue-green eye.
Two days and twenty hours into the flight, the astronauts saw a kind of shore of stars in the blackness. The stars were fixed, not winking as they do when seen through the atmosphere. Lovell had learned in the navy how to navigate by the stars. Should Apollo 8 lose contact with Earth it would be he, using the stars, who would find the way home. It was at this moment that Lovell realized that his points of reference had changed from what they had been even on his orbits of the Earth on Gemini 7 and 12. Then he had been oriented to the landmasses and oceans beneath him. Earth, under those circumstances, was the overwhelmingly dominant reference. Indeed, there had been no other. Now, however, he had multiple references: the sun; the moon ahead, which he could not see at that moment; the stars, which were meaningful to him as a navigator, but to which he had an entirely new relationship; and Earth itself, but as just another of the bodies among which the spaceship moved, in a continuously changing, centerless arrangement.
All around them were galaxies, unfiltered by atmosphere, unobscured by the sun’s light, uncountable multitudes of stars of great brightness. When I think of this moment, a strange emotion stirs in me, a combination of inadequacy, dread, and tears of greeting combined with ferocious shrinking. This is the great moment in which we entered the cosmic environment, body and soul, leaving behind our Earth-centered orientation, however temporarily: understood that this is where we are now. It doesn’t seem to me that we have gotten much farther than this. After his eyes had adjusted to the stars, Bill Anders noticed a large area in which there were no stars at all, a black area of nothing, rather large, with an edge. He could think of no explanation for this void until he realized that he was looking at the back of the moon. The hair stood up on the back of his neck, as it does on mine when I think of it: because something so big was right there and he hadn’t seen it and because the spaceship was physically separated from the Earth by this mass. The moon now blocked contact with NASA in Houston. The astronauts were alone with the galaxies.
Every moment of the trip had been thought out in advance, including the points at which photographs were to be taken and of what. Indeed, the purpose of the trip was to photograph the surface of the moon as a way of scouting for possible landing sites. Anders was the photographer, and his camera was a Hasselblad that required some maneuvers in order to be set up for a shot. For forty-five minutes of the orbit, when they were behind the moon, it was lost in darkness. As Apollo 8 began to come around the other side toward sunlight, the radio kicked in, and space became once again starless, simultaneously black and sunlit. For the first time the surface of the moon appeared, though initially it looked to the astronauts as if oil were streaking across their windows. What they were seeing were the low rays of the sun raking mountains with no atmosphere to tone down the contrast of the shadows. “It looks like a big beach down there,” said Anders to Houston. “The moon is essentially gray, no color. Looks like plaster of Paris,” radioed Lovell. Earthly words performed poorly in this moment.
Frank Borman, the commander, was, in the meantime, intent on mechanical aspects of the journey and impatient. There would be ten lunar orbits, two hours each. He wanted the astronauts to save their sightseeing for later. Every shot had been thought out in advance, but at this point something happened that had not been foreseen. As they came farther around the moon, Earth slipped out from behind it, a little more than half in light, as we are used to in a gibbous moon. But the planet was blue-green and cloud-marbled. A photograph had to be in color, but the film in the Hasselblad, chosen for the moonscape, was black-and-white. It took moments to make the switch, which is why Anders’s photograph shows Earth already risen, a little apart from the moon’s horizon—actually a vertical, called a verizon—as they saw it from Apollo 8.
Though the photo of the full planet in space became the hallmark of the space age, Anders’s photo of a rising, partially shadowed Earth is, to my mind, the image that captures our radically shifting consciousness during Apollo 8. The image of the whole Earth became the cliché, the Whole Earth Catalog logo, the airline logo—leaving this one fresh. The image of the planet in its freestanding entirety had long been imagined, even constructed in the form of globes as objects that had fit in comfortably for centuries amid the furniture in our living rooms. The gibbous Earth just barely apart from the moon that surprised the Apollo 8 astronauts on their first lunar orbit had not been imagined. Anders’s photo inspires wonder but also is full of unresolved ambiguity. NASA named it Earthrise and published it showing the surface of the moon as horizontal, as in a normal sunrise, as if fearful that we might not be able to comprehend it otherwise—or maybe wanting to shield us from just how startling our new perspective was. But in the print that Anders hung on his own living room wall the surface of the moon is vertical, with the Earth moving away to the side.
Many remarked at the time that Apollo 8, rather than exciting us with the prospect of further adventures into space, drew us back “home,” with those photos of Earth freestanding. NASA went on to put a person on the moon, but in a way that literal footing, while introducing the scale of the body, and the weight of the body, and the form of the body—an actual foot—into this vastly expanded frame, was still merely a follow-up to the big shift in orientation that had already happened.
It’s commonly accepted that the view from the moon, showing us clearly the limitations of the planet, propelled the environmental movement into the political mainstream. But at this time there was little general awareness of the global aspects of environmental depredation. Even in the post-moon-shot period, environmental problems were considered piecemeal, as were their solutions, whether that was cleaning up a river or making a compost heap in your garden. Environmental problems were so much simpler, and seemingly more soluble, than the issues at play in the Cold War. Meanwhile the arms race continued in the background, behind the space race, solidifying into the policy known as MAD: mutual assured destruction. In contrast to MAD, environmental causes were downright delicious. The environment as “problem” offered multiple paths of address, some directly effective, and some even fun, such as the grand love affair with wilderness. Indeed, perhaps partly in recoil from the nuclear predicament, which was a planetary one too, the environmental movement in some ways leapt backward into a safer vision of the world, a romance with nature as a mystically grand force—a deflection even in the nineteenth century. Surely the lesson of the view from the moon was that our planet was a walled garden, of which we were custodians who also endangered it. Surely in seeing that we were surrounded by the utterly inhospitable true wilderness of the galaxies, the very concept of earthly wilderness came to an end. As I see it in retrospect, the environmental movement, however inspired by the revelation of the moonshots, in some ways offered a welcome escape from the planetary vulnerability that lay at the heart of that revelation.
We can hardly blame ourselves for failing to make the cultural leap into seeing ourselves as custodians of a frail environment on which we depend. But the romantic deflection hurt the movement, creating political division and holding back changes in our inherited ways of seeing the world. Because of the romance with nature, the movement came to be perceived as anti-people, engendering deep resistance, especially among people of modest means whose livings were affected by environmental laws—when the strongest argument was to save ourselves. At the same time, the movement used the high stakes to turn the cause into one that trumped all other causes, much as the nuclear predicament did. We have not yet really contended with this moral frontier, typical of our age as it appears to be. On a more mundane level, the elevation of wild nature, the utterly unpeopled terrain, the most nonurban landscape was reinforced by the long established structure of feeling among progressives, also going back to nineteenth-century romanticism, that cities were bad, that green places were wholesome, that a new kind of urban romanticism was just then getting under way, notwithstanding.
We can see clearly today that, from the point of view of the moon, the distinction between city and country of any kind, or even city and “wilderness,” was meaningless: that it was all our “environment.” But there was no alliance between urbanists and environmentalists back then. Nor did the small Ban the Bomb movement ally with environmentalists in any major way, despite the fact that the threats were related. All these advocates, for the most part, saw themselves as engaged in different causes. Urbanists were Woody Allens who couldn’t stand the sound of crickets at night and didn’t want to be too far from a café. Environmentalists fled the city at first opportunity and preferred no sign of civilization at all. To pacifists, environmentalists had their heads in the clouds. The walls between urbanism and environmentalism weakened both movements—powerful as they were—in the long run.
Something urbanists and environmentalists shared, however, was an antipathy for the suburbanized landscape. Environmentalists saw it as too degraded for redemption, when in fact the relationship between man and nature as loosely represented there ought to have been at the center of their concerns. As for urbanists, because suburbia drained energy from the city they saw it as the enemy. Had these two dynamic movements, each in its way remarkably successful within its own “territory,” made common cause initially, we might have effective land-use powers at the federal level today. Instead of HUD and EPA as separate entities, we might have an agency that had scope that took in both together: in which responsibility for ourselves and for the environment was seen as the same cause. In later decades groups have emerged in which the two perspectives are combined, and that is a good thing, but the foundational split persists in our bureaucracy, our politics, and indeed our culture.
The view from the moon also subverted our sense of moral security, for it undercut all faiths, political and religious, in a way we have not yet been able to integrate. The astronauts of the various Apollo missions felt this to some extent; for instance, Anders, a devout Catholic, later revealed that his faith had been shaken by the evident inadequacy of any earthbound religion from the perspective of space. If the validity of religion falters, what happens to patriotism? Frank Borman, superpatriot, never commented on how the perspective from space affected his values, but I wonder whether the fading of the American government’s interest in manned space exploration after the Apollo missions—the end of manned flights to the moon and a significant reduction of the NASA budget—was really a recoil from unexpected radical effects of the perspective from the moon, effects that do not reinforce patriotism or traditional religion, or the geopolitical establishment least of all. We went to the moon to compete with the Soviets, but is that cause reinforced from the point of view of the moon? If one considers, as I do, that the Cold War, which generated world-annihilating weapons and a policy of standing ready to slaughter millions of people, compromised the authority of government deeply, then the view from the moon was only going to reinforce that subversive view. I find in the transcripts of the flight a subtle resistance on the part of Mission Control, as if they are insisting on the primacy of our old earthly perspective, undercutting the importance of their own accomplishment, by, for example, going on about the weather in Houston, “which is pretty clear around here. We’ve got high overcasts. But it is cold and good visibility, and it’s beginning to feel like winter again.” After the return Anders commented on the incongruity of this chat, which included football scores, with the experience the astronauts were having. There is no hint of tension in the transcript, however. Indeed, when asked to send a message back home the astronauts grabbed on to earthly tradition, reading from their spot in the heavens from Genesis: “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth . . .” Like Oppenheimer, in order to capture a register of feeling that was the equal of the experience, they had to conjure a divine perspective as described in an ancient sacred book.
We have waited in Terminal 2 for almost two hours. It’s now a half hour before departure. Prudently we approach the gate just to be extra ready. There we learn that the departure gate has been moved to Terminal 3. This was announced long ago, we are told. All the passengers—except for us—dutifully moved. A special kind of panic grips us. The person manning the PA system begins to call “Rover.” I think this is a code of some kind, but gradually I realize that Rover is a transport vehicle. Then I realize that the scene of people embarking onto the elongated golf cart that I had admired as baroque was our fellow passengers getting onto Rover to be taken to the proper terminal and gate. As we wait anxiously, Rover does not appear and time, which was just moments ago so hurryless, develops a quality of urgency aggravated by helplessness special to airline travel.
The desk at the other terminal is called and told not to let the plane leave without us, but the conversation on our end seems altogether too casual. Another announcement calling for Rover is made, but Rover does not appear. We become outraged consumers, blamefully huffing, even though this is clearly our own fault. Rover does not appear. Ten minutes have passed. A stern announcement is made summoning Rover, and the woman behind the desk nods—this will do it, she says—and almost immediately Rover does indeed appear, driven by an African grandfather, who is shaking his head and huffing himself, saying “What a job!” in exactly the way I would if I had been caught out sneaking an illegal coffee break.
We zoom off, wind blowing our hair, up and down ramps and around curves, through a labyrinth of concessions. It’s a long way, though we never see sky. There are obstacles: someone on a very tall ladder fixing a light; dawdling passengers. We huff some more. Our driver stops to pick up a Hispanic woman who looks to be a part of the lowest level of staff workers at the airport. She moves slowly—she is not young—and we huff more loudly, shouting that our plane is going to leave. “She needs help!” says the driver reproachfully. I know he is African from his accent but perhaps also because his attitudes seem unaligned with the importance of our catching our plane. The woman slumps in the seat in front of us, her exhaustion manifest. We are ashamed. But there is no way we can apologize, because we would have to lean forward and we are going at high speed, clutching a hand bar, and cannot safely move. Pedestrians, for whom the African grandfather seems to have little regard, dodge out of the way at the last minute. Acceleration suggests that even the African grandfather realizes that maybe time is very tight, and this, in its way, is more alarming. It is a long way, but we get there and without saying goodbye to the African grandfather rush through the gate and then onto a bus, an unforeseen leg of the journey—no one else is on the bus. Then we are in our airplane seats hearing about oxygen masks and safety belts, a message delivered as a bored old padre might say Mass in a Sicilian hill town, and then we are aloft in the static time and place of planes, the northeastern region of the United States pulling away beneath us, turning blue, and then we lose it as we enter the shelving clouds.
Whenever I approach the village after being away, especially if on a plane trip, there is a point about five miles out, a crest in a series of rising crests, after which I begin to feel the coming together of inner and outer topography, a pending completeness. Driving the hilly road, my body remembers. Through the medium of motion, there is in me a gathering sense of homecoming. I have experienced this many times. This time—the trip back from Maine—it was dusk: a white horse in a field up to its withers in hay, head down out of sight. Then, as I climbed a steep hill, a white cat crossed the road ahead, hurriedly, knowing something was wrong about its timing, and disappeared into another field of hay. The light was fading and the whiteness of the cat was grayed out a bit, making me unsure about what I had seen. But when I looked for it as I passed the spot, its whiteness, caught in a twilight gleam, was bright in the hay. That’s how it was that particular time on the home stretch, a white horse in a field and a white cat crossing the road, and then the first glimpse of the steeple, and then, in the last bit of pasture before the village, another white horse, this one fully visible, swishing its tail, and then I was down the final hill and into the village, the houses close together, some windows lit, the church, and I look to see who is home, and is my friend’s car there, and her kitchen is already lit in the early evening, but I don’t see her in it, as I often do, and then I am past the center of the village and up the street toward the mill and the falls, and then, finally, I come to a stop in front of my cottage and turn off the motor. I feel a little excited and yet at the same time foolish in this, and then I get out of the car, foot to ground, and there it is, the sound of the falls, which I had forgotten. Something happening in the muscles of the back, and an opening of the lungs, a falling away of vibrations. Then normal life takes over—unpack the car.