Fast-Forward

In Boston we met an ex-pat Brit who had sold up and bought an RV - her life was now a permanent road trip, driving round and round the USA, never stopping but seeing everything. That's some retirement, but it would never do for me. I'd feel like a Flying Dutchman or, worse, the Littlest Hobo.

So, although there was still so much to do and see, we had to accept that we were going to miss things on our way home. For us America is a place where we can only snatch glances and moments. It was time to get home, as fast as the Highway Patrols and traffic would allow.

On Sunday we raced through Virginia and both Carolinas - all we saw was a steady rise and fall of road and trees as we furiously crested hills and tore through valleys until they slowly steeped themselves in shadows. We started across Georgia in the dark and saw exactly nothing of it until the impressive skyline of Atlanta finally appeared and we prepared to stop for the night.

Yesterday morning we slipped out of our final motel as efficiently as we've ever done it, motivated by the promise of our own beds, and the thought of our poor abandoned cat, Martha. Ahead of us was a twelve hour drive across five states.

We dispatched the last of Georgia and cut diagonally across Alabama towards the Gulf and Mobile, where the land suddenly changed. Connecting up with the I-10, the road that would take us all the way back to Houston, we found the highway cutting straight as a rule across bays and rivers, swamps and creeks. In places it rises from the moss-brown water on great concrete stilts - mocking the drowned trees growing all around us - and running for miles and miles before the land surfaces once again. The trees themselves are strange too: apple-green pines, their limbs splayed chaotically in all directions or odder still, unknowable trees draped in ivy or something similar, like shrouded figures. When these are pressed in close on either side with their frothy fractal outlines, the motion of the car lends them extra energy so that they seem to be great crashing waves of green, about to break upon the causeway. It's another breathtaking and alien landscape that is suddenly behind us, gone.

The mighty Mississippi river rudely breaks through all this, shouldering it apart. Over the river is yet another enormous bridge - they rise so high here - and getting across is massively symbolic. The river is still the dividing line in America between East and West. On the other side stretched before us the majority of Louisiana and somewhere, perhaps, even Texas. The road and the afternoon progressed steadily, just as we did, on and on until finally another river crossing meant we were back in our own state.

The sky was as grey as the highway by then, the air thundery. Rain clouds fumed overhead and then they too were left behind, boiling away to nothing in the humid Texan atmosphere. The evening shadows forced on lights and the freeway expanded in all directions to try and contain the city, to wrap it up although still far in the distance: Downtown Houston, faint and grey amongst the cloud.