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Day One: From Clarity to Clouds and Rain.

Seroquel with repronex After a few days not spinning my wheels in New York City – I was making attempts at buying gear for the trip, and failing as I typically do in anything related to shopping – I finally left New York around noon on Monday the 14th of April.  I came to the conclusion that if there is any way to protect a laptop from rain, the global industrial system has not yet come up with such a product or gotten one such item to New York City.  “That?” said the clerk.  “Waterproof? I wouldn’t leave it out in the rain, if that’s what you mean.”  “I expect to be outside with a laptop for most of the next two months. It will rain.”  “Umm… well you could try… if the computer doesn’t work anymore just bring it back and say you don’t know what happened to it.  You said it’s a new computer, right?”  I determined that a t-shirt and three plastic shopping bags would probably work just as well.  My conclusions were similar about all the other gear items on my list.  I could improvise much more effectively than I could shop.  I swear I have no idea how people manage to live in New York City without heaping up tons of money.  There’s nothing in the place to spend money on.

http://thehistoryhacker.com/2020 Across Staten Island and New Jersey the first signs of spring were evident: daffodils yellow on lawns, American plums (Prunus americana) blooming white in thickets, spicebushes (Lindera benzoin) greenish in the lowlands.  Along I-70 in Maryland I crossed the Alleghanies and – to me astonishingly – I entered the Mississippi River’s watershed – in Maryland!

And here for the first time the landscape underwent a visible alteration.  Washington had always presumed that the Potomac would become the great river of commerce for the United States, piercing deeply into the center of the eastern seaboard as it does, drawing near to the waters of the Ohio, from which it is all downhill to New Orleans.  But the landscape frustrated these hopes: a craggy, narrow, wrinkled range of hills intervenes between the Potomac and the Monongahela, and despite the short distances all forms of transport across this corridor could never compete with the Erie Canal.  I stopped for dinner in Morgantown, West Virginia, which felt like a piccolo Pittsburgh: it was prosperous but cramped, and it was impossible to mistake the dusky gloom of such a setting: there didn’t even seem to be enough room for the city, and buildings had been crammed onto hillsides and roads narrowly skirted slopes.  I got lost above town, and could neither turn around nor safely turn off the road, as the cross-streets dropped so steeply down the hillside I could not see their pavement – they simply dropped out of sight.

Morgantown is a college town, and it was a warm spring evening.  Young people, faces popping up from behind their phones, walked around me as I stopped on the sidewalk to gape at the opening dogwoods.  I continued on my way, threading through the hills along utterly empty highways.  The West Virginia interstates might be the prettiest of the East; — they are surely the easiest to drive late into the night.  Their courses would make no sense to a Roman: up hill and then back down, around every corner, never straight, it is actually a bit of a challenge to steer (an old truck, anyway) the curves at the speed limit.  As a result there was no monotony, and I drove late into the night.  It was a full moon and the night of an eclipse, which I looked forward to; but almost at the very hour the eclipse was to begin, I drove into rain.

My thoughts were not happy as I rode.  I thought about loneliness, I think, most of all; and I suspected that an experience of loneliness was one of the purposes of this trip.  I was alone, but I didn’t really feel lonely at my cabin: there I was surrounded by the same trees, the same plants, the same deer and turkeys and mountains every day, and they were a pleasure and a consolation, and companions too.  But yet I was alone, and my body and soul unhappy with it somewhere down beneath: and so I had taken myself from my home, made myself an outsider, and the plan was to keep moving to keep it that way.  I was going to drink fully of the cup: and if I hated it, then I would know that I needed to change my life at home, for such was what I had.

I pulled into Lexington, Kentucky, where I was staying with a friend, at 3 a.m.  Just as I turned in to the driveway I found it surprisingly hard to pull into second gear.  It was a presage of the next day’s disaster.

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