Ten miles in we came upon the locusts, road striped and banded with them, fields plagued and shadowed with their mass, fulsome, darker than cloud-dapple, slick as shampoo beneath the wheels. In the next town we stopped to scrape them from the radiator with our pocketknives. Grasshoppers, their bodies crushed and mangled, scaled, primordial, pharaonic, an ancient horde of implacable charioteers, black ooze caking the headlights to blindness, mindless yellow legs still kicking. Not much in that town: sidewalks grown with goldenrod, grain elevator on the old railroad siding. Not much besides wheat and gasoline, the ragged beauty of the heat-painted prairie, wind with the texture of coiled rope, the solitude of the plains unrolling beyond limit of comprehension. It was time to hit the road. Charlie grabbed a root beer; I topped up the oil. We hosed out the dead and drove on.