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Theater. I rode up and stopped. I stared through the glare on the glass at the movie posters. This week The Mummy was playing, and coming soon was A Simple Plan. The Liberty is almost exactly like the first movie theater I ever went to, back in Connecticut in the early sixties. I remembered having my father drop me off a few blocks away on my first date so that Kathy Flanigan wouldn’t see me getting out of our old car. We always seemed to have cars that were ten years older than everyone else’s. It took me at least half the movie to put my arm around the back of her chair. My knee touched hers, I forget if it was accidental, what a surprising thrill. I don’t remember what was playing—it didn’t matter.
    I do remember another night in that theater in Connecticut, a night my life was altered, seriously and profoundly. It was a couple years before I put my arm around Kathy. A few hours in the dark being consumed by what was happening on-screen had actually influenced this moment on this borrowed blue bike in Seward, Alaska. The movie I saw that evening, over thirty-five years ago, would crawl deep into my subconscious to the place where my dreams were born, where my fears originated. The movie was Lawrence of Arabia. I saw it when I was eleven or twelve.
    The opening scene from Lawrence of Arabia has haunted me on and off all these years. It gripped me like a prophecy that would someday come true. I had this feeling, even then as a sixth-grader, that sometime much later in life I would die, like Lawrence, on a narrow country street surrounded by green fields and contented, quiet people.
    Why would that scene, a scene about an adventurer’s death, haunt a sixth-grader? I’d not known anyone who’d died, I’d never feared for my life. I loved life. In the opening of this movie, which won seven Academy Awards, T. E. Lawrence is done with the desert and done with Arabia, where he had led a rebellion, and he heads out for a ride on a powerful motorcycle away from his cuddly, tree-shaded, petite cottage in the English countryside. The walls of his cottage must have become so confining. He fuels up his Brough motorcycle, wipes up some spilled drops, and takes off, shifting rapidly, gaining speed. His goggles keep the bugs out of his eyes. The road is not smooth; he bounces with the thrill of the ride, he feels it. He is going too fast but he must go faster. After all he’s done in Arabia, to feel anything takes more and more. T. E. Lawrence needs to be thrilled again, even if it’s just for the few minutes of the ride. He needs to risk something. Some unsuspecting bicyclists, meandering in the countryside, are in his lane; he is going far too fast, he’s on the edge of being out of control. Still, there is life in his eyes, concentration. Then he begins to skid, then he slides off the road, then he is dead.
    I got a Mustang GT right before I turned forty. Every time I’d get to going outrageously fast in it out on some country road near our farm that used to be only wide enough for a wagon, this scene from the movie would come up in my mind. When I got my hand stuck between two logs, attached to a logging chain, attached to my Ford 5000 gas tractor, and was trapped there for three hours, I thought of this scene. I did not really think I would die but wondered if I would lose my right hand if no one found me until nighttime. Finally, my neighbors Cindy and Ray Williams heard my screams, and Ray released me. That hand still goes numb. Whenever I pull out onto the main road near the end of our gravel driveway and about get smashed by a concrete truck because I am preoccupied with something stupid or silly, I think of this scene.
    I’m not sure why it has been so hard for me to leave home for the last several years. The kind of writing I do, if I don’t leave home, I don’t have anything to write about. Part of it may be that I’ve always yearned for a home and never