165 or 164?

Let’s go home? Ok, let’s go home.

Driving to LAX is always depressing, it’s cloudy, we stop at Huntington to see how it’s changed in 26 years. It has. The LA suburbs are as soulless as ever, the guy in the hire car ‘compound’ looks at the elk-hit non-dustmobile and consults his iPad: we are cool! The elk is now an official part of our hire. I’m ushered away to the courtesy buses I hate so much and feel a pang of regret that the small elk we hit thousands of miles from here is just an addendum on an insurance form I electronically sign. Is it lying with a broken hip starving in Southern Colorado as I browse the Sunglasses Shack at LAX? The car dude laughed at the elk-hit, he’s probably never even seen a picture of southern Colorado – or an elk – yet we were there a week or so ago, this is the vastness and the dilemma of this huge wondrous country, it’s a thousand countries in one.

I’m standing in one of the most imposing and enormous metropolitan areas on the planet and I’m almost in tears about a small animal from Chromo Colorado population 165. Yep 165, or is it now 164? Things define journeys, little events: a hash brown in Illinois, a field in Wisconsin, the Natchez rain… or a broken elk in Chromo, Colorado.