Sunday July 31, 2022; 10:53 PM EDT
- I was in a window seat on a Greyhound bus heading north from St. Louis to Iowa City, Iowa. Ignoring as best I could the rumble and jostle of the bus, the low riffing voices around me in its rows, I was reading a school assignment, a book of theory, and here and there in the margins jotting a few words to remember later. Occasionally, to stay alert, I'd put down the book and look out at the passing row crops and pastures divided from each other by thin lines of trees. Once, not far from the highway, I saw a horse at the margin of a grassy field. It was agitated, fretting and shaking itself but going nowhere. The horse had halfway crossed the barbed wire fence, and was caught, the wire taut against its belly, the barbs raking there with every frantic motion. The bus moved on relentlessly, and the horse receded from my view, as the ones around us who suffer often do.#