Hope might be a tall order, but comfort seems fair enough. He wonders if he someday manages to restore comfort to a constant, will he still observe his surroundings with a similar dopey awe? Or has this just been a fluke? A hiccup in the hard-times smear, a whiff of hickory smoke in the tundra. Will he end up like all those strangers—hollow-eyed in traffic, groaning in checkout lines, slumped over shopping carts—and bloat with entitlement? Will he fall into the ranks of their jaded herd? All of them shuffling after the only thing left: more.

If tomorrow pans out—and with all the practice and prep he’s done, how couldn’t it?—he swears he’ll practice gratitude every morning. Make a sport of it, a part of his morning routine, like how that pretty mother must start her days with yoga or wheatgrass-fueled meditation. Even once they’re back to living with plenty enough, there’s a certain honor to this austerity, so he ought to strive to keep himself humble and coyote lean.

The earthbound scenery doesn’t quite live up to the sky above. The landscape gets bleaker the farther behind they leave the city, each stoplight westward cueing a deeper shade of decay. They’ve already driven well beyond the town center’s franchises and freeway exits. The main road slims from four lanes to two after they pass the last of the housing developments, their pastoral-corporate names as blatantly synthetic as the slopes the houses sit on.

This far west, boarded-up, single-story homes have crawled away from the curb and into the tree line, looking like cadavers abandoned midautopsy. Lonely stretches of scorched prairie in between them. A water tower’s sprained leg. Bible verses on blistered billboards. From post to crooked post, power lines hobble and shrink toward the rigid horizon ahead. Soon they’re passing a series of squat strip malls and empty parking lots, their surfaces bulging and broken like a wart under a microscope. Storefront windows are vacant and dusty, set off by the occasional mom’n’pop shop that’s selling god knows what to keep the lights on and the debt collectors at bay. The few windows that remain lit look more like ashtray embers than invitations.

Laundromat.

Pawnshop.

Liquor & Wine.

Agricultural Supply.

Saint Jude’s.

Nails.

Guns & Ammo.

XXX.

Bowling.

Check Cashing.

Then the strip malls and warehouses vanish into an empty swath of grass that’s neither lawn nor pasture, before extending into a Walmart parking lot. At the end farthest from the store’s entrance, a mobile shantytown assembles itself for the evening. The village centerpiece is a Winnebago. Scattered around it are vans and pickups rigged with makeshift campers of plywood and corrugated metal. A silhouette hefts a charcoal grill out of a sedan’s trunk. Other than that, no sign of life. All those vagabond shadows are easy enough to forget.