I stood on a grassy median in a parking lot in Truckee thinking, This is California. I tried to gauge the space and time. The California air, the California dirt. This feeling is what every pioneer had felt before me. A gazed around the ring of unfamiliar stores and walked back to the van, its engine still pinging as it cooled.

I woke up someplace in Utah or Colorado or Nevada someplace. The road went up and down like big waves on the open sea. I looked out the window at the roadside, dusted with snow, and a rock wall, dynamite-blasted, higher than the sky. The van crept along at the edge of traction. I tried to get a sense of where we were. Where I was. Farther west than I'd ever been.

We entered a tunnel.