Synchronicity
I was not so comfortable on the plane, but that's not unusual: I never am. Maybe if I were flying first-class on one of those full-service international airlines, instead of the airborne MUNI bus Southwest used to tote me to Denver, I would be less irritable, but perhaps not.
Anyway, I had plenty of time to get into Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which I've been meaning to read for years. It's Wallace Stegner's paean to John Wesley Powell, of whom, if you're an eighth-grader in Arizona, you learn a dry, one-sentence summary of his career as an audacious explorer of the Grand Canyon. It takes Stegner's book to correct the impression that Powell was just another guy floating down the Colorado.
What I'd never learned was that Powell had explored other regions. The plane had taken us to just outside Denver when I was reading about Powell's 1868 meander through the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains; I looked down from the plane window...and there was the same territory, now so safe and accessible, just another place on the U.S. map.
