I switch off my laptop to see flashbulb lightning turn the windows white, followed by an everywhere throaty thunder growl. I open the front door and there’s allround dull clouds letting go of warm rain in a gentle trickle - but I feel it working up a rollercoaster pace. The porch seat sighs as I sink into it, whilst grasshopper glass beads bounce off the road and …

We have time for a quick lunch before our bus goes so we think we might as well eat in the Bellagio’s bustling buffet. And the food goes on forever like the Colorado River bends and I really don’t know where to start but just drop in somewhere and take her out someplace else. Behind the buffet are non-stop cooks making pretty much what they made yesterday, but still in touch with the reason for why they …

The pilot rounds out the plane and steers it into the downhill run out of the light Pacific clouds, and all the water down there is rich and thick in the December morning sun.

‘Islands,’ Beno says. I lean over him a little and get a better angle on the world. And the fullness of the ocean is mirrored in the lush green of the scattered islands below …

Go down o go down to the running of the wildest river and drink free with the hand that touches all hands and be with that green leafy moment in the most delicate of places forever. Be one mind with all of everything and pray for nothing more than now and what use is anything else in the fumbling mindsprings of the windswept world. Take it and make it and …

It’s impossible to wrap it up in one view, and this is only a small section of the whole lifetime stretching span of it. All that depth and breadth and the winding Colorado way below with mesas and buttes and all the tumbling gaps and rising flats with the north rim smiling back at us from way over the other side.

And where do you even begin to look into this hollowness …

I see myself a world, a universe, fading quickly effortlessly and silently to sleep. Lazily, fearfully giving up, not in, to everything floating around us, distracting us, taking our minds off all that’s important, all that’s real. All of us remote controlled, glossy magazined, logged on, air-conditioned. The whole new world snoring - falling asleep trying to live. Too easy. Letting go of the planet and flushing …

When I wake I look out my window and it’s completely dark with no-one, nothing, nowhere, no colour, whilst our headlights reach like giant arms into black hole USA and the stereo plays a lonely Gomez number. We stop and I get out to have a piss and the ground under my feet is as cold as the Nevada air and I hurry to get back in and hope …

The project helps give writers the time and peace to reconnect, to realise, and to create. There are no distractions except the thought that Kerouac was at this same house only a few decades ago - which might as well be yesterday, or right now - and was able to rediscover that brilliant candle within himself and light it up for everyone to see. And by doing so he …