There was so much to bring me down during our travels: the miles of highway with multiple lanes of roaring stinking vehicles, creating a demoralizing heat and noise. The vacant faces of obese inhabitants, unhappily making their way through plate after plate of bland fried meats and ham with gravy served at trough-like buffets, floors sticky with spilled food and sugared drinks. The streets of inner Boston--historical landmarks with peeling paint, urine stench of the sidewalks, beggars desperately dancing and calling out desperate pleas. The broken childless houses, inhabitants isolated one from the other, each living the unpeopled world of a television screen. Littered trains, abandoned industrial sites. Meals served in hard plastic containers designed for one use only. Cynical hotel clerks who casually lie about “temporary” phone and pool and internet outages and rental car clerks who behave in advance as though we will cheat them. The vacant eyes and disconscious babble of kids who were too rich and kids who were too poor.

There was beauty, too. The small dark man in Pennsylvania who cleaned our car windows and blessed us from his eyes. The miles upon miles of deciduous forest throughout New York and Massachusetts. The German mathematician in his university tower, arms and legs crossed, in a small room lit by glimmers of daylight, alone in his summer-silent department. The eager curiosity of the Brooklyn girl at Cornell who stumbled into ornithology. The broken button sculpture, the gate of bronze hands at UPenn. The painful awakening on the face of a beggar who took our picture. The songs of the warbling vireo, the song sparrow at The End of the World. The bells ringing and ringing and ringing from the steeple of North Church. The sunlight glowing through the glass window of an Italian express restaurant in Boston, bouncing off the mirror and multiplying, illuminating dyed-blond crucifixed check-out gal, Coast Guard men and women in their dark royal blue with their slices of pizza, a shrunken man with his walker. The woman whose frame shop barely disguised her true passion for futbol. The foreign shuttle drivers--were they African? Brazilian?-- who kept the radio volume up, afraid to reveal their wrestling with the English language. The homegrown shuttle driver who appeared so middleclass, then revealing his broken teeth and need in the thank you for a tip. The house sparrow, so cheeky, on the centuries old headstone engraved with a vacant skull. A son who without asking loaded the heavy bags in and out of the trunk of our little black Chevy. The wet wind tearing through a willow at the tip of a finger lake. The cable station showing the Tour de France, the bicyclists pedaling and pedaling like a simple hypnotic force of nature. The volunteer at Cornell Ornithology lab who took pity and found us a contact in a campus of unknown faces. The stupendous pipes of an organ at UPenn, mirrored on the opposite wall. The guitarist in Boston square, his endless cascade of techniques teasing, pleasing neurons of the brain that did not know they were there. The friendly diversity of the people and the mindblowing eggplant grinders of Tolland, Connecticut.

Then, what to make of the maniacal but friendly drivers of Boston.