All that air whistles past glass, aluminum and steel. Look at them all ignore it, sitting serenely behind their wheels in stale and silent cabins, as if they weren't pushing through matter with such violence. They're in denial. So much so the whistle is no longer audible. The senses easily disregard the constancy. And all those souls screaming on their way by, unheard.

I've been listening to their voices on various channels for an hour or so. These are shallow monologues reedy in detachment. I'm anxious listening to the speculation, the repetition and the dramatization of horror. It's not until I turn it off that the tension between distraction and feeling relaxes and I cry a little.

We've been taught to think like news reporters talk. From them, a society learns how to respond to terror. We detach from emotions by reporting events to ourselves and to acquaintances. We speculate on logistical issues and dream of conspiracy. We replay events, intellectualizing them until atrocity is reduced to words and desensitization extends. We've become obsessed with insignificant details to avoid the silence and the feeling it bears. And in moments when we might notice distance, we have to dramatize even the most horrific event to force the façade of feeling.

This attack affects me more profoundly than the Oklahoma bombing. Younger then, I thought these events were isolated to the people directly affected. Now I have the sense that what happens to one of us happens to us all. That is, an event like this disrupts the human root system and common energy is altered in its magnitude.

Every breath of the living releases the last breaths of the newly dead, there were so many at once....

The radio has been off for some time and the physical world rises above the auditory plane to make a rugged topography, silent, massive and overwhelmingly peaceful.

My gma grew up around here. She played in the McKenzie River where I stood moments ago and once before, years ago with her and my mother. She walked across the highway and down the road to this old white building to go to school. She climbed the steps to that friendly-looking house I've seen in pictures.

Her home valley is rustic. Lush and awash with sunshine, this is the kind of place that fosters isolationist delusions.

I imagine an almost lost generation of people uncomfortable with a community sense larger than a few miles. Interstate and transcontinental traveling is marvelous for taking us beyond reach and kindred safety, and they remain dubious of it.

Bend is lava-laden — I never knew. It looks like Oreo cookie crust.

I'm here with Andrew, subsisting on corporate generosity.

While he bonded with co-workers I rented a bike and drove 120 miles to Crater Lake and rode the rim, which is a silent airy place at the top of the world and sharp like you'd expect it to be.

The caldera's edges peel the atmosphere and keep it distilled to an intense blue such as all the oceans piled on top of each other might look. It's one of the most beautiful places I've seen.

Riding the circumference was hard, maybe the most challenging ride I've ever done. Long steep grades taking the better parts of hours and short fast rewards that give little respite.