On the Wing Read Online Free Page B

easy, Peter. It makes it sound as if any boy could do it, as if not even a boy were required. A rabbit, for example, might make the journey in a certain number of hops, given enough time and carrots.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œSay ‘stages,’” he said, suddenly inspired, “like pieces of the incremental journey of a stagecoach. That has some dignity, given the weight of its historical association with western movies, settler sagas, and the lonely yodeling of cowpokes on the vast prairies. As a traveler by stages, you will be putting yourself in the long line of westward voyagers, making yourself a part of America’s restless yearning for what I think we might call westness. And stage has a nice ring to it. Hop does not ring at all. It sounds like a dull thud on a wet drum. Take it from me: go by stages, not by hops.”
    So I went by stages, though I had planned to go by hops. I think that I would have reported here that I had gone by hops, despite Mr. MacPherson’s counsel, if it were not for the fact that hops suggests too much time spent in the air. Because being in the air is what makes a hop a hop, hop suggests, it seems to me, that the hopper is in the air for the entire length of each hop. “The entire length of each hop” would be more time in the air than I actually did spend in the air, and I am firmly committed to total honesty in this account. I went by stages, on the ground, along roads, with a great deal of divagation and an occasional hop when I was for a moment a few inches, sometimes a foot, in the air.
    Making the trip in stages confirmed in me a tendency that had been growing for some time: the preference for working in small steps, for making life’s journey little by little. I think that this tendency may have been born on the earliest clamming trips I made with my grandfather, when I watched him clamming, treading for clams by feeling for them with his toes, and I learned, without giving it any thought, that a clammer acquires a peck of clams one clam at a time, that the filling of a peck basket is a kind of journey. Whether Lao-Tzu had anything to say about the connection between clamming and life’s journey, I do not know, but I do know that there came a time, sometime after my youth, when I turned my step-by-small-step tendency into a guiding principle, and I began deliberately to live one small step at a time. Living according to this principle has meant that many of life’s jobs have taken me longer than they might have been expected to take. Many of them are still in the process of completion, and I know people who would count “growing up” among those, but I swear to you that I do work at them all, a little bit at a time. So, for example, I write my memoirs as I’ve lived my life, a little bit each day, hop by hop.
    *   *   *
    I TRAVELED WITHOUT A MAP, though that was not my original intention. I had intended to travel with a map, because I had thought that I needed a map, and I was convinced that I needed a special map, a superior map, that “just any map” would never do. I already had maps of the United States, of course—several in an atlas, more in an encyclopedia, and others in a gazetteer that showed the typical products of various regions—but I felt that none of those would do. They were maps, but they weren’t aviators’ maps. I supposed that I needed maps like—but superior to—those that automobile navigators used, the sort of map that my grandmother wrestled with every summer when my parents and I traveled with my grandparents to West Burke, Vermont—and, later, West Burke, New Hampshire—my grandfather at the wheel of their Studebaker, as pilot, and my grandmother beside him, as navigator.
    I should explain the two West Burkes. In 1854, fugitive transcendentalists from Burke, Vermont, established West Burke, Vermont, as a utopian community. When, in time, some of