I Saw A Young Hawk Flying

The thirty day bus pass that gives this blog its name kicks in today. And I have even less of a clue of what I'm doing than when I started.

Seattle's been a good jumping off point. It's a city, and it's an easy to navigate city. A nice city. Yesterday for lunch I had a dozen oysters. When I arrived alone the waiter offered me a newspaper if I wanted. Then he told me that oyster happy hour -- a dollar an oyster -- was about to begin. Then he told me which oysters to get. One set of oysters, he said, had arrived less than an hour earlier. They were phenomenal. At the end, there was a complimentary chocolate desert thing.

Seattle, by the way, is the first place I ever had oysters. With my grandmother. They were awesome then too. And with these oysters, I felt half-convinced that I had only been eating oysters all along only for the memory of those orignal ur-oysters, and now, but only now, oysters were finally living up to their original promise. They were really good.

The whole thing made me feel safe. I picked the right place for lunch, and was treated kindly, and therefore everything was right. I was right, the world was right, good choices had been made and it remained only to reap the benefits in tasty oyster form.

Right. I could walk around and I could come back to my hotel room and look at the internet, and I had the half-promise of my train friend to call, and yet I was away, with that kind of weird distance that comes from travel. I looked at myself in the mirror yesterday and thought, "Who the hell are you?"

I don't know what the rest of the trip will be like. The plan is: bus to Mt. Vernon, WA at 3:15. Bus from Mt. Vernon, WA to Spokane at 9:25 p.m.

I don't really have a death wish, by the way.