Departure by A. G. Riddle Page A

every hour to activate our cell phones and snap photos, but we never get any service or see anything significant. It’s like Mike said: hills, fields, and forest as far as we can see, both with the naked eye and with the binoculars Bob found in a carry-on bag yesterday.
    Finally we get to the ridge from where Mike took the photograph and spot the octagonal glass structure. It looks about ten miles away, and the hike to it confirms that. We don’t even stop for lunch. To Bob’s credit, he keeps up, though he’s panting a lot harder than Mike or me and looking drained. I could swear he’s aging by the hour, but I don’t think he’d miss this for anything.
    About halfway to the octagonal structure, at one of our hourly stops, I look around through the binoculars and spot something else: a stone farmhouse to the south, maybe another ten miles away. I make a note of its position—if the glass structure is a bust, it will be our next stop. I study the house for a few minutes, searching for signs of life, but there’s no movement. It looks abandoned to me.
    It’s later than I had hoped, midafternoon, when we finally get to the glass structure, which is much bigger than it looked from the ridge. It’s at least fifty feet high and maybe three hundred feet across. The glass walls are frosted bluish white, and the frame appears to be made of aluminum.
    There’s no pathway—dirt, paved, or otherwise—leading to or from it. Very odd.
    The three of us walk the perimeter, looking for a door. Halfway around, I hear the sound of a seal breaking. A panel rises from the ground toward the ceiling, a frosted glass curtain revealing a spectacle I can barely believe.
    The three of us stand there, our eyes wide.
    I know this place. I’ve been here only once in my life, but that day is easily one of my most vivid childhood memories.
    I was eight then, and for the entire week before I visited this place, I counted down the days and hours. It wasn’t the destination that excited me. It was the chance to take a trip with my father. He was the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom at that time, and we didn’t spend a lot of time together. That day, though, I felt very close to him.
    I remember the drive, the moment I caught my first glimpse of the site. The morning fog still shrouded it, veiling the ancient treasures towering in the green field. I turned the name over in my mind as we drew closer: Stonehenge. Everything about it seemed otherworldly to me.
    I was more mesmerized than my peers. To the other kids on the tour, the prehistoric monument was just a bunch of big old rocks in a field. Not to me. And not to my father. To him, it was not only history but inspiration, the symbol of an ideal. Nearly five thousand years ago, its builders had sweated, bled, and sacrificed to preserve their culture and their vision for future generations. That these mysterious people had erected Stonehenge and some part of it still remained toinspire and inform us, however cryptically, spoke to my father. It was how he saw his own career as a diplomat, I realized that day. He was building his own Stonehenge—America, and specifically its foreign relationships—to help pass down his vision of a better human society, a global one, with freedom and equality at its center. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me or spending time with me, he just thought his work was more important.
    Stonehenge, age eight: that’s when I gained a perspective on my relationship with my father that spared me a lot of anguish throughout my childhood. It was a revelation for me, something to hold on to when I found myself wondering why he was never around, why other kids’ fathers took so much more interest in them.
    But that revelation pales in comparison to the one that confronts me today. Twenty-eight years ago this was a crumbling ruin, chipped away by time and vandals, half the pillars gone, some lying on