They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then his father spoke again.

“Imagine if we could actually see it. All that light and energy, swirling around us all the time, shooting through the atmosphere. If they could only channel it, there’d be so much power, nobody would even have to pay their electric bill.

“Imagine if you could blast off to some other galaxy,” he said. “Never dig one more irrigation ditch. Never milk one more cow or haul off one more stillborn calf.”

Then he was quiet, and Nate went back to looking out the window. He leaned against his father’s shoulder, not quite sleeping, just taking in the glory of the night.

It was past eight o’clock when they pulled into the Tidy Town Motel in Spokane. Nate had never been to a motel before, and he was so excited, he found himself wide awake again. There was a little bottle of shampoo in the bathroom and a paper cover on the toilet seat and a machine that, if you put a quarter in, made the bed vibrate. He turned the TV on. Gunsmoke.

“Man oh man,” he said, stretching out on the bed. “This is the life.”

“Sometimes I wish I could just keep driving,” his father said.

“Only we’d miss Mom and Junie,” Nate said. “And Poppa and Grandma, and Aunt Sal and Uncle Harold, and the farm.”

“Still,” his father said, “it’s a nice dream.”

•  •  •

The next morning they roused themselves early. They were due at a stable a little ways outside Seattle to deliver their hay. Nate’s father had explained to him that the stable boarded horses for rich people who rode for pleasure. “Wait till you see the getups these types of riders put on,” he said. “Hats, boots, funny-looking pants. Gloves, even.”

It made Nate feel special, to think that they were delivering feed to rich people’s horses. The stable manager had said to his dad that there’d be a man on hand to help unload the bales. “No need,” he’d told the guy. “My son can help me with the job.”

They reached Seattle at ten o’clock, a couple hours ahead of schedule.

“So tell me,” said his father. “Have you ever seen the Pacific Ocean?”

His dad knew he hadn’t, of course.

“Well, then, it’s about time we took care of that,” said Dad.

They drove right into the city, past the Space Needle and the convention center. All around them, people in ordinary cars looked up with surprise at the truckful of hay moving along through traffic.

Nate and his dad slipped down a steep hill with a row of warehouses and rounded a corner. Then they saw it: a vast expanse of blue, with a couple of ferryboats and oil tankers docked at one end. “There you are, son,” Nate’s father told him. “On the other side of that you’ve got yourself Japan.”