It’s now June 29, 2020. I am midway through my Alaska trip – was ahead of schedule at the Hatcher Pass Road, so I’m home before going over the pass on Raudi. Pete posts my dispatches and photos. He told me this morning that he could not find my June 5, 2020 dispatch. I told him that I was certain that I wrote it. He then said that he looked and looked but could not find it. I told him I know I wrote it and that I know I sent it to him.

I foresaw that I could look for it and perhaps find it. Or I could look for it and not find it. Either way, this would take time that I don’t have because I am (again) mid-trip and have a lot to do in order to get ready for the next phase of my trip. And there are things here on the home front that must be tended to. So I decided to instead write another June 5, 2020 dispatch.

I enjoy reading books about time travel. Time travel, defined, is the concept of movement between certain points in time, similar to movement between different points in space by an object or a person. The concept of time travel as we now know it first materialized in H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine.

Maybe Pete painted the windows on the greeenhouse on June 5th

Traveling to an arbitrary point in spacetime has very limited support in theoretical physics, and is usually mentioned in relation to quantum mechanics and wormholes. We have plenty of wormholes here – maybe worms are time travelers. What a concept.

Some of the time travel books that I recently read and enjoyed are The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, and 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
It’s fun to suspend disbelief and, in the course of reading a time travel book, go from present to past and past to present. Can’t do this in real life. We can, sort of, but it is only sort of.

I can hear staid English professors saying, “What’s the matter, isn’t the present good enough for you?”

The whole concept of being in the present, all the time, has never really fully set well with me. There is a lot to be said for the past, which is fictive, and the present, which is fictive. The present is what is, but I am not going to disavow that which has already happened or we think has already happened or might happen.

So I am going back in time in writing this dispatch. I have no idea what was most momentous on June 5th. My June 4 and June 5 dispatches might provide a needed point of reference. I am not going to return in time and reread them. Rather, I am going to go back in time and speculate a bit.

On June 5th, I worked around here, rode my ponies, and began planning for my upcoming trip. To see if the latter became a reality, read on.

Next: 157. 6/6/20: A Conversation with Tyra