Familiar but abstract. Even though Amos had told his son about Lichport many times, the town had always felt far off, a place that kept his father from him. Although he’d been born there, it was like a foreign country to Silas. Now that he could feel the night wind on his face, now that the car was driving swiftly in the direction of that otherworld, Lichport was becoming more real, part of an actual landscape that he was just beginning to be able to see. What is it about traveling by night that makes even a short journey strange and a little wonderful? Momentary lights appear and pass across the windowpane so fast they burst suddenly into view before becoming patterns of the past, stars that grow ever more distant as they follow their opposite course away from the car as it hurtles on its way through the darkness. As Silas rolled down the window, the smell of the salt marsh and the distant sea flooded the interior. He imagined his father driving this same road hundreds and hundreds of times.
