And now I did not have to think about the mosquitoes too much, either because I was in my tent again looking at the bloodstains on the ceiling where I'd squashed the ones that had followed me in and bitten me and gotten away for a minute or two before I caught up with them, and I could see the shadows of so many others on the outside of the nylon, smelling the blood inside me but unable to get at me, waiting for me to go out, and then after I ran back inside scratching my new bites and killing the assault guard, the others would land on the fly again, waiting now for the sunny night to end so that I'd expose my flesh to another day; but meanwhile I was inside and they could not torture me; I did not have to slap the backs of my thighs every minute on general principles, or sweep my sleeve across my face to kill mosquito-crowds; and it was astounding how quickly I forgot them. They were all around me and had not forgotten about me, but I'd shut them out and they meant nothing. I cannot remember what I thought about. Most likely I did not have to think about anything, because I'd gained asylum into an embassy of the easy world that I was used to, enjoying it flapping round me in the sunlight like a boat, all blue and orange, with the shadow of the blowing fly bobbing up and down.
When I hitchhiked from San Francisco to Fairbanks, mosquitoes surrounded me with the hymning hum of a graduation — not right away, of course; not until I got to Canada. As soon as I was safely in a vehicle they could not affect me anymore and I rode the familiar thrill of speed and distance, lolling in the back of the truck, with a beautiful husky kissing my hands and cheeks, and we slowed to let a moose get out of the road and at once I heard them again. — A mosquito bit me. — I was on the Al-Can Highway now. I forgot the night I'd given up, not yet even in Oregon, and stayed at a motel, my face redburned and filthy, my eyes aching; and it had felt sinful to spend the sixteen dollars on the room but it was raining hard as it had been all day, so no one would pick me up. In hitchhiking as in so many other departments, the surest way not to get something is to need it. The more the world dirtied me, the less likely someone would be to take me in. — But the next morning was sunny and I had showered and shaved, which was why a van picked me up within half an hour and took me into Oregon, and as I rode so happily believing that I now progressed, I didn't even consider that the inside of the van was not so different from the inside of the motel; I was protected again. When I remember that summer, which now lies so far behind me, I must own myself still protected, in a fluctuating kind of way, and so a question hovers and bites me unencouraged: Which is worse, to be too often protected, and thereby forget the sufferings of others, or to suffer them oneself? There is, perhaps, a middle course: to be out in the world enough to be toughened, but to have a shelter sufficient to stave off callousness and wretchedness. Of course it might also be said that there is something depressing and even debasing about moderation — how telling that one synonym for
