sent from: London, UK. destination: Earlsfield, London, UK

I was driving. My new best friend Paul was navigating. He had a knife. I didn’t see it, but he talked about hunting bears and living in the woods, it seemed safe to assume he had a knife, a big knife on him all the time. Other than that, he was a nice guy. I picked him up in Oregon, heading north. He lived in the woods of Montana, logging. He travelled to Crescent City to secure work for the crabbing season. He’d lived in Alaska – hence the bear hunting. He said it was getting harder to live the way he wanted to. What was was that, I asked? Where you can live your own life and not be bothered by other people, he replied, and fell silent.
I wondered what he meant; he had a wife and needed people sometimes, like me for instance. It was the rugged American individualism and isolationism taken to its extreme. You can live a truly remote existence in the American wilderness in a way that you can’t in Europe. I imagine he’s a small-government fan.
At midnight we were in Northern Oregon. On an empty road fringed with tall trees, Paul asked me to stop. He got out. In the time it took me to turn my head towards the road and back he had vanished.