Chesterton: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."

There are stronger forces than culture. Maybe.

We experienced some pretty abnormal-seeming places on our way here, including plenty of Canadian towns on the Alaska Highway that appeared to be little else than bouquets of eateries and lodgings collected around the vital fueling stations and washrooms.

Driving the Alaska Highway through sparsely populated areas of British Columbia and the Yukon can add up to revelations about important things like space and time. It's odd and sort of refreshing to experience the marriage of modern roads and vehicles with much older ideas of isolation and long-distance travel. Pace and distance are largely undefined, left for individuals to scale and log. Infrastructure carries a different meaning, something both leaner and more extensive.

Along with new and more robust ideas of geography, we've stepped into time that is more fluid and tonal. Since the heavens leave us with progressively little from which to map our daily structures and limits, we strive to grow new or newly apparent qualities, termed maybe something like "mental rhythmic rigors" or "temporal biopower."

In other words, if you're ever writing about the "Heroes" song and album by David Bowie, don't forget the quotation marks.