Terra Nova

The future is curved like the horizon. Some of it is unavoidable, unalterable. Dead ahead, you might say. Some of it is plainly visible--on a clear day--but navigable. You can keep to the same course, and arrive straight where you are headed, or tack, and land elsewhere. There are maps and tools and eyewitness accounts to aid you if you are inclined to seek direction.

The greater swath of it lies outside our peripheral vision, and there are no instruments, no markers, no flashes of clarity by which to scry it. One day you are sailing along, the next you have run aground. You stumble around and wonder, "How did I get here?" You look behind, wondering how to get back.

But there is no way back, not for you or the place you have been cast upon, the paths you will have to clear, the people who were not expecting you.

It is a new world.

I never saw Arkansas on my own horizon line. Not in diary entries, doodles, or daydreams. Not in a train, not in a plane. Prior to 1992, I thought it was pronounced Ar-KANz-ass, and was adjunct to Kansas. Like North and South Dakota, or the Carolinas. Kansas and Ar-Kansas. If I had to come up with a mental image, it would have been borrowed straight from the Wizard of Oz. Tumbleweeds and twisters.

I was engaged to my first husband and living in his house in a nondescript suburb of St. John's, Newfoundland (ironically named Paradise) when Bill Clinton came out of nowhere into the world's consciousness. If this were a novel, it would be obvious foreshadowing that the first time I took notice of Arkansas, it was during a television interview about an extramarital affair. It would almost be overkill, and a good editor would tell me to give the reader a little more credit.

But at twenty-two years old, I was barely literate in life. If I cracked open the book at all, I was mostly interested in the pretty pictures. I certainly wasn't reading between the lines.