November 24

Rode about 60 miles and stayed behind the Library in Wye. Beauregard Parish is dry. Lights, dogs, traffic all night, but hey it was cheap, and I ended up sleeping very well.
November 25 Same as yesterday. Cold foggy morning which became 65 by 9:30 and the 70 by noon. I'm in Merryville, about 7 miles east of Texas, at the Historical Society's museum, wondering if Susan Quade will hear from her brother or the young woman in the grocery that I am camping here. If so she might come by and unlock the bathroom for me. Otherwise I'll have to do it in a leaf pile.

Reading through these entries I see how eager I have been to celebrate every kindness shown to me, no matter how predictable. Some of that is wistfulness, in the absence of true friendship, and some is whistling in the dark. I will be glad to get out of the deep south tomorrow. Texas is southern, certainly, but I've dealt with Texans since I was ten.
Kaplan makes logical predictions for the directions various segments of American society will take, or would have taken, from the mid '90's. And his work thus becomes a study in the futility of forecasting, beyond the immediate future. He says the car will remain dominant in the shape of urban growth, because there is an abundance of oil, but neglects global warming and the depletion of biomass as a result of urban sprawl. He predicts further fragmentation of cities, and overall social structure, as greed overpowers patriotism - he could not reasonably predict 9/11. The upsurge of patriotism might be confined to the working class, but it is universal there if a flag poll is an indicator of it, and I know that there is a resurgence of concern in the upper classes about the effects of the politics of oil, as it helps create Al Qaidas and ecological disasters. But greed, for wealth and its indicators, and the status and power attendant upon them, remains as the dominant motivator, and might negate the countervailing emotions generated by such concern.