To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. The Book of Disquiet, section 229 Fernando Pessoa
In the summer of 2021, I was returning to Kansas from a writer’s conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Along the way, a small rock must have hit the windshield of the car because I watched a crack climb from the lower left corner across my line of vision to the upper middle part of the windshield. It divided the line of hills. It divided the road. Light reflected from the crack as the sun moved across it.
I had just read from A Line of Driftwood, the Ada Blackjack Story, in which I had experienced a similar split between Ada’s diary and the diary I wrote from her diary as I read it.
There were two different worlds that didn’t meet. But were somehow connected in a unified world not visible through the crack in the windshield. On the flat land of Eastern Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas, it was the road that was staggered. In a day and a half, I drove 1,063 miles of the divided land. How appropriate the crack. Split as A Line of Driftwood is split between diaries, both in the same book. Split as some of Ada’s diary itself was split on transference.
When Ada’s diary was sent electronically
