So where exactly am I heading? No names, no pack drill. Old habits. On a need-to-know basis, I guess, and it takes a week or so to establish my destination, and after a little bit of my own hastily recalled and pretty rusty fieldcraft, a flight west and a few nights in motels that offer not much more than a clean bed and cold drinks out of vending machines. It’s not possible to journey in America without coming to believe that we are a nation in flux, a people hurrying hither and thither, driven by the complexities of our existence and in pursuit of whatever place might let us think of it as home – a vision that is itself constantly changing and not always destined to be fulfilled. So in the airport departure lounge I meet a woman taking her ailing husband on one final trip to Vegas, as if hoping a change in fortune might be found in the holy spin of a ball or the grace-filled turn of a card; in a service station over a coffee I watch a college basketball team on their way to some tournament stretch their legs in the parking lot and shoot imaginary hoops, their lithe jumps like some slow-mo ballet; a modern-day Joad family piling back into their beat-up Winnebago and about to set out to wherever they think a better life awaits; and of course those legions of trucks on every road I travel, seemingly all of them decked in various flags and slogans, their good-luck charms and talismans. In the same service station I pause for a few seconds to look at the collage of faces on MISSING posters, some of them children, all of their eyes looking out towards some irrevocably altered future, and then as I turn away a woman hands me a flyer advertising a gospel campaign and telling me that the wages of sin are death. I say thank you and keep walking, slip it into my pocket, and as I continue my journey I feel as if I too am part of this relentless flux, cut loose from the established and secure moorings of my own life, but heading towards something that may be nothing more than a mirage.

Eventually, steeped in weariness and coming closer to the end of my journey, I find myself bumping over dirt roads in a hired SUV, the sun slicing through scrub and semi-desert so that its frazzling brightness hurts the eyes. I am voyaging through a part of the continent unfamiliar to me and which seems intensely distant from the world I know. I experience a stark sense of dislocation and wonder if I have set out on the most futile and misguided of impulses, marked by misdirections, miscalculations, an almost accident with a riderless, careering horse, and suspicion in the eyes of anyone I ask for help in pointing the way. The last of these a Marlboro Man, his face like dried-out hide with creases so deep that dust could layer itself on the ledges of his skin, who shakes his head in response and then spits with a vehemence designed to suggest that no one of any worth would be going to the destination I had enquired about. But however long and arduous the journey, it is nothing compared to the rapid migration through time I have been making as memory threatens to overpower the present.