COUNTDOWN.(travel)

In 1969, the drive from Minneapolis to St. Louis took twelve hours and was mostly on two-lane roads. My parents woke me up for it at dawn. We had just spent an outstandingly fun week with my Minnesota cousins, but as soon as we pulled out of my uncle's driveway these cousins evaporated from my mind like the morning dew from the hood of our car. I was alone in the back seat again. I went to sleep, and my mother took out her magazines, and the weight of the long July drive fell squarely on my father.

To get through the day, he made himself into an algorithm, a number cruncher. Our car was the axe with which he attacked the miles listed on road signs, chopping the nearly unbearable 238 down to a still daunting 179, bludgeoning the 150s and 140s and 130s until they yielded the halfway humane 127, which was roundable down to 120, which he could pretend was just two hours of driving time even though, with so many livestock trucks and thoughtless drivers on the road ahead of him, it would probably take closer to three. Through sheer force of will, he mowed down the last twenty miles between him and double digits, and these digits he then reduced by tens and twelves until, finally, he could glimpse it: "Cedar Rapids 34." Only then, as his sole treat of the day, did he allow himself to remember that 34 was the distance to the city center--that we were, in fact, less than thirty miles now from the oak-shaded park where we liked to stop for a picnic lunch.

The three of us ate quietly. My father took the pit of a damson plum out of his mouth and dropped it into a paper bag, fluttering his fingers

a little. He was wishing he'd pressed on to Iowa City--Cedar Rapids wasn't even the halfway point--and I was wishing we were back in the air-conditioned car. Cedar Rapids felt like outer space to me. The warm breeze was someone else's breeze, not mine, and the sun overhead was a harsh reminder of the day's relentless waning, and the park's unfamiliar oak trees all spoke to our deep nowhereness. Even my mother didn't have much to say.

But the really interminable drive was through southeastern Iowa. My father remarked on the height of the corn, the blackness of the soil, the need for better roads. My mother lowered the front-seat armrest and played crazy eights with me until I was just as sick of it as she was. Every few miles a pig farm. Another ...