We traveled half a world and it wasn’t enough. We needed to get the stink of Europe off us at all costs. We wandered and pounded and leaked to the West, did the end-around Tierra del Fuego, and finally bisected the continents, parting a curtain of mosquitoes and jungle, to make two oceans one puddle to hop.

The faint aroma of the lost cities of Cibola mixed with the piquant fragrance of Kublai Khan that wafted over the only water left. Across it the Japanese would come, and soon enough. It seems calm, there on the edge of the precipice. Perhaps Americans aren’t happy anywhere else.