In Alberta on friday (July 15), we began another transition. From prairie to trees. The trees began emerging slowly. Tall, short-limbed evergreens that could make me think of snowy Christmas cards, before traveling through mile after snowy mile of them, with only the road and an occasional truck attesting to the presence of humans.

After we'd been driving silently through this new terrain for a while and the trees seemed a permanent addition, Andre said, ah, now I feel better, like we're really in North Country. The feeling that comes with seeing these trees, fewer people, and the higher elevation is what brings him here.

I'd been thinking—just then—about my reluctance to leave the prairies behind, so I said, actually, I'm feeling a little melancholy leaving the prairies.

He was driving, and his head snapped toward me with an incredulous look as I continued, this makes me feel frightened and alone. Who knows why? It's not as if the prairie couldn't drive me crazy with loneliness and fear.

Regardless, we're moving slowly from gold, dusky beiges, and bright yellow, to green. All green. The woods are thick on both sides of us, with some open meadows. Behind signs that say Reforested in 1979, or1989, the trees are still small, but numerous and tight. Spruce, pine, aspen, willow, birch. And everything's steeper. Shadows of clouds fall across the highway; the hills rise higher and higher, in succession.

Tonight we're at the Prophet River Campground, in a clearing with mown grass, picnic tables, gravel pull-throughs. It's been a day of rain ending with sun. There's one other motorhome here. A camper truck with a young couple, their child, and a dauschound trotting behind them, pulling a tinkling apparatus behind his paralyzed legs that looks like Eddie's Wheels. At 10:30, everyone but me—and the plentiful mosquitoes—is asleep. My neck is getting stiff and it's finally getting dark. The papers are out on the rubber mat near the door, for Elvis, just in case. We aren't plugged in to electricity, but the light over the stove is on, and I'll turn on the bedside lamp to finish About Schmidt by Louis Begley. Funny, how many worlds we move in.