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time in eleven years. She was thirty years old, finishing her first year as a graduate student at the University of Hawai‘i, divorced from one husband, separated from another, a single parent of two on a five-week cross-country road trip with her children and her mother. “Pretty exhausting,” she wrote to a friend, “especially since we travelled by bus most of the way.” Stopping first in Seattle, Ann visited Jackie Farner, the only high school classmate with whom she had stayed in contact. Like Ann, Jackie had made some unorthodox life choices—moving to rural Alaska to teach, living in a log cabin, marrying an Aleut. On a day trip into the Cascades, Barry and Maya saw snow for the first time. Then they headed down the West Coast through California, across the desert into Arizona, and over to the Grand Canyon, then east to Kansas City and Chicago, doubling back finally through Yellowstone National Park and San Francisco en route home to Honolulu. “Actually, I was surprised how little change we saw,” Ann wrote. “More bluejeans, campers and mustaches, but the countryside around Seattle looks about the same.” In Kansas City, they bunked in the basement recreation room of Arlene Payne, Madelyn’s sister, who was teaching at the University of Missouri. Jon Payne arrived from Colorado, not having seen Ann since his months on the Dunhams’ couch on Mercer Island sixteen years earlier. They all spent a few days talking and playing darts, Jon venturing out into the sweltering heat to take Barry and Maya to a baseball game. Jon was struck by Ann’s evident happiness, her pride in her children, the confidence she had acquired. She was, in some ways, a different person than the one he remembered. Having weathered the turbulence of the intervening years—pregnancy at seventeen, raising biracial children, her years in Jakarta—she seemed to have come into her own.

Back in Honolulu in early August, Ann wrote a long letter to Bill Byers, the wheelman on the fateful, Cadillac-convertible flight to the San Francisco Bay Area. She had telephoned him during the bus trip but had found him at the end of a marriage, facing the death of his father and in no mood for conversation. Her letter was humorous, unself-conscious, earthy, self-mocking, mordant, gently teasing, and emotionally direct. “If you could find it in your CRABBY heart to scrawl me a note I would be overjoyed!” she wrote. “Surely, out of the last twelve years, you could sift a couple of tarnished badges to flash at me. I am not such a harsh critic after all, having screwed up royally a few times myself.” She enclosed two photographs, one of her children and one of herself, dressed in a black dashiki with bright orange trim and a pair of oversized sunglasses, her brown hair thick and loose, swept over one shoulder. “Would like one of you if you have a spare,” she scribbled in a postscript, soliciting a photo in return. “Doesn’t matter if you’re bald and fat or skinny and hairy. I’ve gained about 15 pounds in the rear since coming back from Asia too.”

In Hawaii, 1973

She recounted the bus-tour itinerary, then described, with caustic amusement, a chance encounter in downtown Honolulu with a certain “rather dull, round-faced boy,” a mutual acquaintance who had gone on to some success in retail. “Fingers aglitter with diamonds and rubies, he offered me a ride in his limousine and gave me an invitation to a fashion show he was staging that afternoon,” she wrote in fluid, loopy script. “I didn’t especially appreciate it since I was dressed in the baggiest most non-descript dress I own, pigtail and rubber slippers and looking very scroungy that day (I believe his exact words when he saw me were: ‘Well, well, just look at you!’) I could have clobbered him, but it wasn’t worth it (is anything?)” Recapitulating the recent events of her rather eventful life, she brushed past her second marriage. “I remarried, to an Indonesian geographer,” she wrote, then dropped the subject abruptly. She ventured a guess at her future: “Just recently I got an East-West Center grant which will carry me, albeit