Zuo wo zhongwen gongke de shihou...

So, what makes a country live in your mind? Why is it that I can *feel* the difference between Canada and the U.S. when I go between the two? It's not the accents, or the language, or the flags, really, though those things do come into play. In my mind, the U.S. is a huge country that has been explored, mapped and cut up into manageable chunks by cities and highways (except for some parts, large of tree, wide of canyon, big of sky, that can't be reduced). Here, up North, I feel the wilderness still holds sway, vast and uncharted despite what we may like to think.

In Europe, everything is full of the past. Here, everything is large. The New World is built on a different scale and it saddens me a little to think that wherever I go, I won't ever feel the same emotion I did on a July day almost ten years ago when I watched the Rockies grow around me after I had chased the horizon across the Prairies for three days.