We returned the way we had come, a long straight shot down I-10 back to Tucson. It gives the odd impression that our two houses are located along the banks of a huge river of cars. It also makes the freeway feel like it’s just a giant driveway that starts and ends in Pasadena. There’s some historical truth to this, as Pasadena is home to the oldest freeway in America, the 101. In my mind’s eye I see an aerial time lapse of freeways sprouting like ivy from that first tendril across Southern California.

The difference in population along different stretches of the interstate is also quite remarkable. Within LA, or Phoenix, the interstate runs sometimes seven lanes wide, like a huge parking lot thundering along at 75 MPH, and for an astonishingly long time, mile after mile, until some part of me starts to imagine the entire world as a single paved city, with no escape.

But as soon as this idea settles in, I find that we are on some remote stretch of it where nothing is visible but the road itself, gradually evoking a sense of desolation as uncanny and as seemingly permanent as the sense of overpopulation. In fact, on the way over, we had bypassed Phoenix by using I-8, and driven for close to an hour without seeing even another oncoming car. During these times my mind runs to the question of how much emergency water is in the car, rather than worrying about collisions.

But our Odyssey was well up to the task and we were tested with neither collisions nor breakdowns, shuttling through the two-dimensional interstellar space of the southwestern desert and arriving safely back in home port, full of good memories of Dana’s cultivated oasis in South Pasadena.