Palmer knew this road intimately, but now he felt disoriented. Landmarks are how we navigate and scale ourselves to landscape; their steady, dependable presence projects a sense of permanence and inviolability, which helps to anchor us in space and time. We don’t call them “songlines,” as they are known in Australia, but they serve a similar psychic role: we know when we see a familiar feature that the next one—a sign, a gas station, a tree, a hotel—will be coming along shortly, and in this way we stitch our homeworld together. Even though we may only name them when giving visitors directions,
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