The face of God will appear with his serpent eyes of obsidian. 

Along the road we passed a store called Vapor Maven, then a business called Gasco across the street from Envirotech. One stretch of highway outside of Mesa Verde National Park was kept clean by "Lady of the Woods (Wiccan)."

I don't have an original or especially personal vocabulary to talk about spirits or the sacred. We spent yesterday in communion thrice over with communities of the dead, in different forms and expressions, and here I am grasping for the forms and expressions adequate even to name them.

A particularly vivid lightning bolt struck before us on the Texas highway (the old Route 66), just as the chestnut tree was riven by lightning in Jane Eyre by Jane's acceptance of Mr. Rochester's proposal. We turned off the audiobook for a moment to appreciate this doubly pathetic fallacy.

A very large man with very long red hair and a long red beard has just emerged from a shower stall and approaches us. "Can I ask you something weird?"

"This is where the grasshoppers live," the old man says.

Here are some fragments of memories of these trips that have accreted to form my consciousness of my place in America, my place in the world.