Week 1, Memory 1

I find myself trying to wrap my head around the distance between Spoleto and "home." Riding in a box encased in metal and flying through the air without a window to look out of disconnected me from the distance we were traveling. In the smoothest moments of the flight you might even think you weren't soaring above the clouds at five hundred miles an hour. A rocky patch of air puts knots in my stomach and reminds me how fast and how far we're moving. We seem to have lost respect for the distances we can travel today. We complain about being "packed into planes like sardines for nine hours" when a century ago that sounded like a luxury.

When I was a child I had a very poor sense of distances and measurements, as every child does. Gilette, Wyoming isn't a large town, in 2000 it had just under twenty thousand residents. One day, as I rode into town in my father's work truck from the plains covered in nothing but sagebrush and dust I asked him, "Do you think Gilette is more than a mile wide?"

He chuckled and said, "I certainly hope so."

I was fascinated, maybe it was even two miles wide?