When I was in elementary school, I knew a girl whose favorite car-trip activity was to hold a pad of paper in her lap and loosely clutch a pen in her hand, its point barely touching the paper. She loved to make her own little seismograph chart as the car moved (rumble strips were loads of fun, I’m sure).
I played that game without meaning to while writing my “blog in the field” in the pocket diary that I packed at the last minute. Here is my last entry, written when our bus crossed back to the Buckeye State from Wheeling.
Melville at the Customs-House 