with spots of fresh rain on his shoulders

Along and over the Mohawk. Onward, onward. I don't find that the road hypnotizes or lulls me to sleep. That's good, of course. But it's eerie the way the rest stops are identical always, differentiated only by the name of the local county. All of them are Native American names. Oneida or Cayuga or others. Even the squalling kids and the parents wolfing down Sbarro pizza seem identical from one to the other.

*

I saw hundreds of crows on the way here.

Hundreds? That must have been impressive ... a flock of 200, 300 crows, all black and wheeling around and cawing.

No, no ... not a flock. Just one crow at a time, by the wayside. Sometimes two. No more than that. You see a black bird stepping along in the grass, and you think, 'oh look, a crow,' and you don't think much of it. And you don't think much about any of the other crows you see, either. But hours later, you realize you've seen hundreds of crows that day.

*

There was an old radio show. I had a tape of it. It wasn't the Twilight Zone, I think, but it was something like that. The Inner Sanctum, maybe. I don't remember. There was a 40-minute episode in which a man driving cross country sees a hitchhiker while leaving his hometown: a man in a tan raincoat, the first drops of the incoming shower visible on his shoulders. He drives on, taking the old Route 66. Every hundred miles or so he sees him again. Always he is dressed the same way, and always, even in the middle of the southwestern desert, there are spots of fresh rain on his shoulders.