The Thodyssey

Thomas's journey has already featured enough drama and tension for an entire trip, and he is barely 48 hours into it. Thursday evening, about 36 hours after he left our house, my phone rang. I saw that the call was from him and my stomach sank. I answered it and the first words out of his mouth were, "Don't get mad. I'm going to tell you something but you just can't get angry or upset." Of course my heart clenched, stopped beating, and I lost all feeling in my legs. It turned out that Thomas couldn't find his debit card (they were at a gas station somewhere in Kansas and when he went to pay it wasn't in his wallet). Well, compared to a car crash or the engine exploding into metal shards, this was a relief, but also incredibly stressful. I promised to get online to cancel the card and protect his money but without a debit card, how was he ever to get himself across the country? And if he ran out of cash somewhere in Idaho, several hundred miles before reaching Debra's house in Oregon, what would we do? Then I remembered he had a credit card which I had given him before his trip to England last year. He has never used it and so had forgotten about it. I threatened to pull his legs off when he got home if he lost that--or the car key--or his driver's license--or his passport---or anything else during the rest of this journey. (I went online and saw that no one had used Thomas's card, so most likely it is stuck under the car seat or set carefully aside under a diner counter by some very nice waitress who wants to make sure it stays safe. Perhaps Thomas can swing by to pick it up on the way home in four weeks.) In spite of such setbacks, the journey must continue! This afternoon I demanded a few pics as proof that the trip was really happening and he wasn't just sitting in a Starbucks somewhere downtown Flint. Thomas sent photos of the Classic Thomas IlK; artfully placed architecture, entirely empty of humans. Here is St Louis:

Here is Indianapolis:

Here is Kansas City:

And here is a place that I had no idea existed, Cahokia Mounds (which is a series, about 80, of giant pre-modern American mounds, apparently made of dirt carried from a billion miles away; it's a Dirt Henge, I suppose).