Day 10- May 29, 2006 - Seattle-Portland

It's a travel day, which means another ride on the train. The people around us are new to the game. We are old pros, setting up and placing our ticket above us, claiming. And part of me wants to brag tjat we rode three days from New York to Seattle, because it feels like an accomplishment, something worth noting, even if we just sat and slept and did nothing particularly remarkable in that time except experience.

The last travel day, to Seattle, I spent the time tracing telephone poles along the roads. I like the ones that look like wire dresses on hangers, all lined up and connected by wires stretched tight, but not too tight, between them. They were only in Canada, and as we got closer to the border, the towers morphed into robots with clawed hands holding wires, and a homeplate missing from their chests. They looked like an army and I imagined them coming to life and marching toward a siege of both countries, radio-ing each other back and forth across the fields, moving half an inch each day so the farmers can't detect the unearthed ground at their feet. They'd commisserate, facing forward, lined up like oil rigs, waiting to simulateously explode.

Some kids find shapes in clouds. I find shapes in everything. And maybe it is due to my lack of artistic talent, my inability to create anything I haven't somehow seen before.

We have been gone ten days and this is officially the longest I've been from home.