I am convinced that deranged Druids were the architects mapping the roads of Boston. They must have cut open a goat and inspected the twisted entrails as they plotted the most propitious paths to get lost on in this misplaced metropolis, this place that the gods dropped among us, this urban mess that waylaid me last summer. Rebels and madmen sired this empire, John Adams greatest among them, a man who once told Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence because Adams believed himself a Boston cur whom no one would go along with if he penned those hallowed words. Though, as I stroll beneath the cackling canopy of wires and stoplights in mangled Cambridge, I wonder what King George would have thought if he had received Adams' letter instead of Jefferson's grandiloquence, if the queen would have fainted and wet nurses covered the ears of royal children as a blushing herald read Adams' blasphemous oaths to the court—that's an alternate history I would pay to see.

America began here when straitlaced purists uncivilized New England, or so said the guide to tourists who gathered around Plymouth Rock, surprised to find that it was only a rock. Those that I overheard who got bored of staring at rocks returned to the shore to indulge in Boston's fish fetish: here men smell fish and catch fish and buy fish and house fish in the aquarium and if they are feeling frisky they pay to ride fish in Codzilla, a harum-scarum boat ride rivaling trials at Salem.

I left the cape and its kind and went to Walden to get transcendent in mind, but the Scrod People followed me on their unicorn floats, a plague of loons hunting for Thoreau, and I only got transcended when I read afterward that I just soaked in a pool visited by over a 250,000 swimmers every year. And there, bathing in trillions of germs and diseases, I got as close as I will ever be to being one with humanity.