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to the canopy of blackberry bushes when something compelled me to look back at the farmhouse one last time. An arm was slowly reaching out from behind the front door. As it extended, I saw it held a mackerel, its head pointed towards the ground. Ever so gently, the hand was moving the mackerel back and forth in a swimming motion like a child playing with a toy. Suddenly, a face appeared above the fish. It was the face from my apparition. It was a smiling Jimmy the Natural wearing a tightly-knit woolen hat. His face resembled a moon one might see on a bright night and his eyes were wide as saucers. As quickly as he appeared, he vanished. It was the last I saw The Natural.

A decade later, I met a fisherman who frequented Killybegs. I asked him if he had ever come across Declan and his brother. He told me he had known them well and they were “great craic” (great fun) but something horrible had happened to them. They were burned to death in their sleep after a night out drinking in Killybegs. Police believed the fire was caused by a discarded cigarette butt. The brothers, who never drank together died in the same bed and were buried in the same grave, he claimed.

Looking back, it is hardly surprising that Jimmy the Natural comes to mind when I think of beauty, lost innocence and the kindness of strangers. I often reflect sadly on how Patrick Dempsey and other locals felt they had to protect him from a cold, cynical world that too often shunned diversity and inner beauty. Some details of this story, including names, were altered for the reasons I have just expressed, namely I would not wish anyone going in search of The Natural.

Martin Dillon worked for the BBC in Northern Ireland for eighteen years and has won international acclaim for his nonfiction books about Ireland, including The Shankill Butchers, God and the Gun, and The Dirty War. He is often called on as one of the foremost authorities on global terrorism.

JOHNNA KAPLAN

Flyover Country

It’s too big to grasp—but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

BETWEEN BACK EAST AND OUT WEST, IN THAT OBSCURE sweep of green you glimpse from the airplane window before you close the shade and put on your headphones, roads roll out across the fields like shiny gray ribbons. The sun rises over tiny rivers that you can drive across in a fraction of the time it would take to pronounce their names. It sets over cities you never think about dominated by mountain ranges you never knew existed. During the years I lived in Missouri and almost everyone else I knew lived between New York and Boston, I drove back and forth many times across this unappreciated expanse of America.

Usually I took the Interstates, which were their own world, divorced from whatever was going on in the unseen towns beyond them. The presence of civilization was indicated by watchful cows and by truck stops, which periodically appeared in the distance like miniature cities. I drove alongside lumbering big rigs. I was forever passing them, and they were forever appearing in front of me again. I sometimes felt like the only person in a sea of things, all kinds of things being busily carried to and fro. It was an odd vantage point, I was unused to seeing so much commerce with so few consumers.

For entertainment there were billboards: “Avoid Hell. Repent. Trust Jesus Today.” “Where will you spend eternity? Jesus Christ is the answer!”

For reassurance there were Lewis and Clark Trail markers, which momentarily overruled the doubts I had about the sanity of my decision to move. I told myself that in leaving New York I was not giving up or stepping down. I imagined that I was better suited for another era, a time when West was the direction everyone in America wanted to go. Also comforting were the national forests, which reminded me that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t decide whether the East or the Midwest was my home; they belonged to the same country, after all, and I could claim that all of it was mine. Sometimes I was the only one driving through a national forest—not just mine, but mine alone.

Sometimes