‡ There is nothing more to say about North Dakota now. Perhaps even more completely than they would had I merely mused upon them in the context of the trip, any episodes that I have neglected have escaped my memory. I suppose talking to my father, or hearing tales of other peoples’ travels might cause them to resurface, [or reconstruct themselves from some partial edges of memories sketched concretely here, into something that I had not even experienced], but that is not the concern of these writings. These were never meant to be comprehensive, always unfinished and digressive. The smell of burning wood fills my nose at dusk on this Sunday evening in Atlanta, dogs bark, it is unseasonably cool, I feel, as I write these lines, in pencil, without fear, that I am back in my body, back in time that runs with me, two abreast, another jet engine hides in the sky.

‡ This is the penultimate page. The morning of your last day traveling is always, my last day traveling is always far different than the arrival home or the actual end of the trip. It contains a certain listless emptiness, a pointlessness to my actions, will any of this be remotely memorable, the trip is effectively over. It was like the afternoon before I left, a somewhat nagging fear of the flight bolstered by a localised ennui, this place, for the next few hours, has nothing left to offer me, and I can contribute little to it. So I find this penultimate note. It is Sunday evening, almost exactly the same time one week later as I penned the above lines on the airplane. As in all travelogues there is a sort of race, either with in situ writings where the text constantly chases you, me, through actions and locales while I jog in place, or the post facto writing in which you chase your memory. My goal, after deciding that my joy to be home last Sunday night should equal my thrill of being dislodged for three (3) days, was to make two (2) texts, or in fact one (1) that was three (3), the two (2) are in situ and post facto, but the materials they address and toy with are neither, they are a race against my greater memory, an attempt to latch associations onto more recent events so that they will not dematerialize. I don’t know what will happen to any of them. All of these moments they ride and the places they transfer over are in flight, they must land somewhere.

‡ I don’t feel like I captured that moment at the top of the grassy plateau adequately enough. I think I may have been still too close to it. These, or, this is the distance, the detachment that separates the writer from the diarist, although I fear calling myself either, or anything at all. I had walked, climbed into another world, distant in all measures, time, space, consciousness; if innocence and dawn are a place, they are rolling upon native grasses, they touch the sky completely at all points, they are found by accident, one cannot seek contentment or solitude, in the search for quiet and regression one finds only distraction and stress, always, for in seeking I establish implausible standards, contentment, in the home, as the silent cat innocently looks out the window in an overcast sky [she does not know the disarray she looks out across], as I read at two AM (2AM) by lamplight in a dark room, or at the most bustling moments in a busy street on foot, walking just to feel the air cool your back, my back, is fleeting, generally once it is recognized it is gone, but the landscape on that high plain sustained the feeling by its very continuity, had it not ended, my wonder would have continued, but it was me that left it, it is still there, perhaps overcast slightly, like Atlanta today, Sunday, like Bismarck one week ago, getting closer, the silence of Medora, tucked behind badlands and empty, closer, the tracks of bison north, the breeze blowing the tufts of their wool shedding for the summer and carrying it through the air in high currents to the top of a plateau, a narrow worn trail with bison hoofprints and a small herd, some creatures nestled down in the high grass, their heads slowly moving from side to side, slowly and deliberately turning a horn to the sky, an ear to the precipice, two figures ascend quietly and make their way around the opposite hill and safely out of sight.

‡ “Why do things have to die?” Why can’t everything exist in a state of equilibrium, the barter system I wondered if Bismarck could bring itself to operate on, without any single participant needing to sacrifice itself to maintain, equilibrium. Why could the prairie dogs not be left in peace? Why can’t a second, if there is a second, where nothing dies, nothing feels pain, nothing is anxious, be protracted, held onto, dwelt within, for all the rest of the seconds. Or that is the final second. Close your eyes. It would mean that you slip away, that you forfeit your power, you slip lower, equilibrium, there are billions of wood ticks in North Dakota, you must sink for each of those wood ticks to rise just a bit, you must be annihilated, your consciousness annihilated, you see with the prairie breeze across your carapace, it is a vision of feeling, your consciousness is grey, equilibrium is not a state in which the strong remain strong and the weak remain weak, the bison cannot eat the grass forever, the prairie dogs cannot eat the grass forever, the planet would be bald, and you and I would starve, if there was nothing to stand in their way, or ours.

‡ Things, all things in all measures, grow hazy as they recede into the distance, any kind of distance. How long do we hold on to them, retain their form. It is always in memory, whether it is a sound, an object, a person, or even a memory. These things that have turned into memories slip away as well, into shells around shells, around memories of memories. When they are written about, described, reminisced upon, they become physically something else once again. They occupy space and a more current time. The process of recession and recall, losing the horizon in the haze and returning to it a form, perhaps the horizon of the sea as light becomes visible breaking through the clouds to play across it, gives you comfort when you lose your equilibrium, when there is nothing left to support you when everything that you try to fix upon has been washed over, only the hum of the engines that follow you, that propel you, are constant, only feelings, warmth, love, contentment, fail to turn into intangible haze.

‡ When I landed in Rome I had nowhere to go. I had not booked a pensione, did not have a map, and had not slept in thirty (30) hours. It was late morning. I went straight to San Carlo Alle Quattro Fontane, which I had learned the address of, in order to see the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa. The way the light, which barely fell onto it, from the cupola and the bizarre arches that awoke it, playing across the gold rays and he pale face swept away my temporary homelessness [I cannot, in fact, remember the light at all, and only picture the statue as I see it in photos], I loved the smell of the dank basement crypt where I stood completely alone and silent. I wandered the streets ducking into every albergo and pensione. “Ha une camera?” There was nowhere to stay in Rome. I began to grow despondent, then horrified, and then it began to rain. I finally found a place, the clerk scoffed when he told me the rate, three hundred dollars ($300) a night. I put down my credit card, delirious, and went to my room and fell into an uncomfortable afternoon slumber. When I awoke in the dark, my body was hot and my eyes and sinuses felt cramped. I walked the rain wet streets in the dark, tried to phone home on a payphone and stood in front of Saint Peter’s, the antique yellow light reflecting in the glimmering wet piazza. It was empty and late. I walked back to my room through the rain. The room was stifling and white. I opened the window overlooking a small courtyard and climbed out onto the roof with a chair from the desk. I sat in the dark. The night sky was almost blue. I could see only up. A plane flew across the opening in the roof. I was completely alone and silent.

‡ Yes, it consumes, as feared. But I embrace it. There is an integral passion in the fluid composition of my life. Yes, more academic pursuits, drudgery, distant thoughts and sterile actions fall by the wayside for, what, one week? I will most certainly finish this short work by tomorrow night. As we raced out of Atlanta, climbing to the west and looping far south around an enormous stormfront which had hit Atlanta by the time I had reached the Twin Cities, apparently striking a plane from the Atlanta airport with lightning, our path through space took us through such enormous caverns of cloudscapes, we would penetrate into gothic voids with grey ceilings and continuous folds of flocculent halls and tunnels, when the clouds would drop away creating an opening to the earth, the sun reflecting from outside of the storm system off of the ground and back to the underside of the clouds would fill the void with the most ethereal shade of yellow I have ever seen. It was pure lemon afternoon sunlight [made into solid vapour by consuming the clouds as they embraced our jet]. Is that memory not enough to warrant losing one week of my life, that commission to paper for when my mind turns to vapour, not worth another layer of graphite on the misguided drawing taped to my desk?

‡ The sun is going down in Atlanta. I am on my porch with a black coffee. The air is filled almost constantly with the sound of jet engines. [I don't know if it has always been like this since I moved here or if the increased frequency of my travels as of late have awakened a need in me to look up at the planes flying and be reassured by their not falling out of the sky into my neighbourhood.] Just as one drifts into silence, to the north, and the birds’ twilight songs arise, another cascade of deep whirring and metallic tearing of the sky into a solid being bored through washes across my house. All day I worked in the yard on the vegetable garden and the house. I worked myself into a rhythm with the planes, my enemies. At such a distance, and with such distance, having no plane tickets currently booked anywhere that I would have cause to fixate on, I can look at the planes, slightly darker than the sky they skirt, as beautifully heroic vessels, a parade of possible endings, Bismarck, Portland, Rome, Los Angeles, flames.

‡ I keep meaning to consult a map to see whether the town was Belford or Belfield. At the end of our long hike and relatively long drive through ranches and oil fields, back from the north unit, the town was a welcome dose of civilisation, although not the sad shock back to chain restaurants and chain motels and open businesses that we would have suffered had we drove on to Dickinson, or Dickenson. There was a single restaurant at the interstate commercial district that was clearly marked ‘Restaurant’ with its name, Trapper’s Kettle, hardly visible in weathered copper over dark wood. We gave other options not a second thought and dove right in. It was an incredibly large restaurant with odd furnishings such as a salad bar in a canoe and bristly rope lariats wound across the back of each chair. Everyone seemed to know each other and people would make the circuit from table to table saying “good evening.” A rotund man in overalls spent more time at each table appearing to have meaningful conversations with each group. We speculated that he was either the mayor or the preacher. I don’t know if there was a center to the city set apart from the highway where there might be another eating establishment. I recalled being in Mexico City and getting chastised by my colleagues for eating at VIPS, a south of the border Denny’s clone where I ordered the most bitter lemonade concocted on the planet. They felt that it was not an ‘authentic’ experience. It was in Mexico was it not? “Where do you think Mexicans eat; where do you think Belfieldians eat?” Although I felt rather uninspired eating at Trapper’s Kettle, and I could have found the fare anywhere else, I was in North Dakota, and these were real local people, not curiosities. Who am I to question their validity, to smirk at their Saturday evening social?

‡ It is hard to write the way I like to write with a cat on my lap. I prefer to have the page in my lap, which is easier if I am writing in a hard book, but these proofs I have been writing on now seem rigid enough, just so, to sustain my light miniature script. There are twenty-three (23) sheets of paper here, one third (1/3) of the final number of sheets that were left in the notebook, if I had written one less it would have been more difficult to write here. As it is I am having to place the papers on a table and reach over the cat with my right hand to write. I am continuously petting her with my left hand so that she won’t leave, or so that she won’t attempt to get onto the table to eat the beets which are growing there. I found that my ideal setup for composition was at a coffeeshop in Athens, GA where they had small, relatively low circular tables. I would pull my chair so far up to the table that its central support pole was immediately between my thighs. The table was so small that it almost disappeared beneath my open book. It, no, the level of it was somewhat higher than my lap but actually this was a more effective level for the curvature of my arm and the angle of my wrist, and I could write smaller because it was slightly closer to my eyes. The table was so small however that I did not have room for my soy latte, served in a clear glass stein, which I had to rest on a neighbouring table when one was available.