Sometimes I think about the time he took me out for a drive to look for things to photograph and how we stopped for lunch at some little roadside diner, I don’t remember where, and how we both ate grilled cheese sandwiches while he told me I shouldn’t listen to a word he said about subject and composition, I should photograph only what I wanted to photograph, and how I wanted to photograph it. I said I wanted to photograph him, so he sat back and smiled, posing, and I told him not to smile, I wanted him to look exactly as he really was and not some grinning stranger. So he stopped smiling and looked out the window, and I took a photograph with my Brownie, kind of blurry because I was too close, just across the table. But I still have that photograph. I wouldn’t trade that photograph of my father for all the gold in Fort Knox, because in that moment we were happy, in that photograph all our happinesses are contained.

Afterward, on the way home, he told me I ought to be a photographer someday. He said I had the instinct for it, because here I was, only nine years old, and already I knew how I wanted to photograph somebody: not as mere fact but as truth.

“What about your face?” I say to Lindquist. “What are you thinking in that photo?”

She laughs. “As I recall, I’m thinking I’d much rather be back inside the airplane.”

But she’s not in the mood to say more. Sometimes photographs have that effect as well; you’re drawn back into yourself, your own reflections on the past, and you don’t want to share them. That’s fine too. I figure she’ll go to bed thinking about what we’ve just seen, about that monumental flight to Australia with Sam Mallory, the flight that changed her life, and not only will she wake up remembering all kinds of details she’s long buried, she will want to unburden them to somebody.

Because of all the bicycling and surfing, I have no trouble falling asleep as soon as I crawl between the fresh new sheets of that bed. My battered, exhausted body can do no more. Not a single clear thought, not a twitch of muscle. For a few blessed hours I am plunged in the deep, and then I burst back out, panting, just as fast as I went down.

I consult my watch. Twenty-six minutes past one o’clock.

As I know from experience, there’s no point in lying flat on your back, or tossing and turning in some vain attempt to get back what you have lost. I throw off the covers and walk naked (I don’t wear pajamas, but maybe that doesn’t surprise you) to the carrying case that holds all my photographic equipment.