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By Root 2253 0

in a place that was entirely alien to me, that was only a—not even a concept!—but just a word, a single meaningless word: Colorado. My inchoate young mind could not even begin to wrap itself around the full implications of all this. We would have to say good-bye to our urban existence. We would say good-bye to the magisterial ivy-strangled gray stone buildings of the University of Chicago. Good-bye to the crushing crowds, the bleating cars, the thundering trains that shook us in the night. Good-bye to the mannequins at Marshall Field’s, good-bye to the scientists at the lab, good-bye to Haywood, good-bye to Mr. Morgan, with his parrots, his bagpipes, his backgammon, and his boiling beans. Good-bye to everything I had ever known.

People, unknown people, came to us from the outside world from time to time. Lydia would greet them at the door of our apartment and tour them around our domicile. They would open the doors to the rooms and closets, point to what was inside of them, say things, then shut the doors, twist the faucets to run the water in the sinks, flush the toilets, aimlessly amble around from room to room fiddling with knobs and handles, inquisitively poking and pulling on the various elements of the space. They usually seemed amused or intrigued or frightened to see me, quietly, industriously painting away in my room. I generally ignored them. Eventually these strange visitations quit happening, and Lydia and I spent several days collecting all of the many personal articles of our domestic existence and putting them into big brown cardboard boxes. Then one day several enormous ill-smelling men came into our apartment, picked up all the boxes we had made and put our things into, carried them outside into the cold, and loaded them into a giant orange truck parked outside of our house; then they got inside of it and drove away with our things. Lydia assured me that our possessions would somehow already be in the new place where we were going to live when we got there, but I was not so sure.

The next day, Lydia and I locked our now nearly barren apartment, carried down the walk two brown suitcases stuffed fat with personal necessities such as clothing and toiletries and put them in her small car, buckled ourselves in, and began to drive.

Now, the longest trip in a vehicle that I had ever taken in my life was from Lincoln Park to Hyde Park, from the zoo to the lab. If traffic is light, this is a journey of about twenty-five minutes. Which is to say, I had absolutely no psychogeographical measuring stick in my mind by which to even begin to comprehend how mind-bogglingly big the world actually is, or of how much time it takes to truly traverse it. A woman and an ape drove from Chicago to Colorado: a journey of more than a thousand miles that swallowed up two long days by car, even traveling as we were at absolutely harrowing highway speeds.

We pulled ourselves out of the ooze of traffic that slimed the highways of the western suburbs and onto a smooth screaming expanse of gray asphalt that soon bore us through rolling white hills, through snowy fields—endless fields—past barns and grain silos and tractors and the metal skeletons of agricultural machinery sitting dormant in the winter, past ice-coated rivers, lakes and streams, past fences and long bights of utility wire drooping from one cross to the next, each one comfortably seating hundreds of blackbirds. The sky opened up. For the first time in my life, I saw the sun melt below a naked horizon, reminding me of a golden egg frying in a pan. For the first time in my life, I saw land, I saw a blue sky made giant by the absence of visual landmarks, I saw vast tracts of empty space. And it amazed me. No one had ever told me the world was this big. Throughout the entire journey I think my face was squished flat to the cold glass of the passenger-side window of Lydia’s car, my eyes watching the outside world whip past me in all its immeasurable and unknowable magnitude. Periodically, we stopped the car at gas stations. Lydia would insert a hose into a hole in the side