You found Westing. You are about to set off on a journey across the country on the back of a motorcycle, a 1983 750cc Honda Nighthawk. Along the way, you'll get very deeply into head and heart, you'll fall in love, and you'll meet a succession of American characters on the road. You'll see and smell our continent in the month of July, when plants are blooming, birds are chirping, and people are tracing instinctive paths of migration. You'll feel what it's like to drop everything in your life and journey to the West , hoping you'll find something to put you right again.

If you have read this far you are also becoming part of a new kind of writing project. I'm writing Westing as you are reading it. You and I are birthing the project from opposite sides of the glass.

I am writing. Not I was. The Westing project is true fiction, because memory cannot capture what I am trying to write to you. It's true in the sense that everything happened. It's fiction in the sense that I'm telling a story that has been told before, trying to tell it clearer, louder, than what I'm hearing in my head. Story is a message passed from one person to another. A Fable. A Tale.

The Ant and the Chrysalis

An Ant nimbly running about in the sunshine in search of food came across a Chrysalis that was very near its time of change. The Chrysalis moved its tail, and thus attracted the attention of the Ant, who then saw for the first time that it was alive. "Poor, pitiable animal!" cried the Ant disdainfully. "What a sad fate is yours! While I can run hither and thither, at my pleasure, and, if I wish, ascend the tallest tree, you lie imprisoned here in your shell, with power only to move a joint or two of your scaly tail." The Chrysalis heard all this, but did not try to make any reply. A few days after, when the Ant passed that way again, nothing but the shell remained. Wondering what had become of its contents, he felt himself suddenly shaded and fanned by the gorgeous wings of a beautiful Butterfly. "Behold in me," said the Butterfly, "your much-pitied friend! Boast now of your powers to run and climb as long as you can get me to listen." So saying, the Butterfly rose in the air, and, borne along and aloft on the summer breeze, was soon lost to the sight of the Ant forever.

-- from Aesop's Fables