The old road has lots of twists and turns but few surprises.

From Alfred’s journal

Flew the river road this morning instead of cutting straight over the orchard, because the wind was wrong and because I have flown it four hundred times. It bends twice at the quarry for no reason anyone alive remembers, doubles back at the culvert, and then runs dead straight past the feed store. I used to think a crooked route meant an interesting one; I spent a whole spring avoiding anything I could predict, on the theory that prediction was the enemy of attention. The old road has lots of twists and turns but few surprises. What I noticed instead was a gray cat under the third fence post, which was new, and which I would have missed entirely if the turns had still been taking up room in my head. Switch says he takes the same branch down every morning and has never once thought about it.