Field Notes: Texarkana

• Texarkana greeted me with humidity and with flies.

• Warm evening, windows down, cicadas in the trees. The bartender makes medicine from Maker's Mark, grapefruit juice, Drambuie, sage, honey and bitters then tells a story of feeding Dramamine to a psychotic cat while stuck in Memphis traffic. Newly weds from Arizona in their sixties down the bar. He stands and pulls out her chair when she returns from the bathroom. We talk Alaska and suddenly I am no longer tired

• No Ubers out at this early hour. I call a cab and a pickup truck with a horizontal crack across it's windshield arrives. The flies are waiting for me inside the airport along with one fat and silent cricket. Security here is vigorous. There's about one officer for every three passengers. They open my carry-on to inspect a portable steamer. They are patting down a woman's hair now. Outside, the lavender dawn.