ain at LaGuardia. It was being loaded
aboard a DC-16 headed for Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and
Manila. I didn't know how far it was going so I bought a ticket for the
route with my travel card and I got aboard just ahead of the closing
door.

My bit of mail was in the compartment below me, and in the hour travel
time to Chicago, I found out that Chicago was the destination for the
mailbag, although the superscript on the letter was still hazy.

I followed the bag off the plane at Chicago and stopped long enough to
cancel the rest of my ticket. There was no use wasting the money for the
unused fare from Chicago to Manila. I rode into the city in a
combination bus-truck less than six feet from my little
point-of-interest. During the ride I managed to dig the superscript.

It forwarded the letter to Ladysmith, Wisconsin, and from there to a
rural route that I couldn't understand although I got the number.

Then I went back to Midway Airport and found to my disgust that the
Chicago Airport did not have a bar. I dug into this oddity for a moment
until I found out that the Chicago Airport was built on Public School
Property and that according to law, they couldn't sell anything harder
than soda pop within three hundred feet of public school property, no
matter who rented it. So I dawdled in the bar across Cicero Avenue until
plane time, and took an old propeller-driven Convair to Eau Claire on a
daisy-clipping ride that stopped at every wide spot on the course. From
Eau Claire the mail bag took off in the antediluvian Convair but I took
off by train because the bag was scheduled to be dropped by guided
glider into Ladysmith.

At Ladysmith I rented a car, checked the rural routes, and took off
about the same time as my significant hunk of mail.

Nine miles from Ladysmith is a flagstop called Bruce, and not far from
Bruce there is a body of water slightly larger than a duck pond called
Caley Lake.

A backroad, decorated with ornamental metal signs, led me from Bruce,
Wisconsin, to Caley Lake, where the road signs showed a missing spoke.

I turned in, feeling like Ferdinand Magellan must have felt when he
finally made his passage through the Strait to discover the open sea
that lay beyond the New World. I had done a fine job of tailing and I
wanted someone to pin a leather medal on me. The side road wound in and
out for a few hundred yards, and then I saw Phillip Harrison.

He was poking a long tool into the