The Obstacles are the Way
1 Air travel has always been a kind of salutary purgatory for me, a layover space of life when I begin to ask the best questions, whose answers, though often insoluble, nevertheless induce a kind of higher mind thinking, at least if the jetlag hasn't gotten the better of it. I’m somewhere thirty-thousand feet over the western plains. My guess was the Dakotas. I opened the Alaska app and in fact I was just north of Casper, Wyoming, a semi-straight four-lane highway intersecting our flight path, completely empty. There in case of an Eisenhower emergency, I suppose. I’m sat just above a massive turbine, it’s rivets not quite perfect matches of each other yet still holding strong, still showing signs of man’s interventions as much as we want to make machines out of the whole of us. What do I want to do with my time? Looking down on those long accents of dirt road, I fantasized, for not the first time, of what it would be like to take my favorite bike on a forget-everything adventur