I became much less ambitious for a time, or rather, Romantic. Enamored of the poetic visions of this nation and its interpreters. A longing to track the landscapes and adventures of our poets here, a kind of belief in the ideals of Steinbeck's "Travels with Charley." But also remote things, distant things: the farthest reaches of the Canadian wilderness; walkabout in the bush; Siberia and between here and there, the nuclear and industrial wastes of old Soviet land; the soft sounds of the sea upon the thousand tiny shores of Homer's Greek islands.