Chain Reaction

Winter sips his java outside the Starbucks at 16th and K streets NW. (Photograph by D.A. Peterson)

"Ohhh," he groaned, "What happened to my database?"

But we have heard him say this before.

THERE'S MORE TO SAY, though, about the woman. In the days after I returned home, Jodi kept e-mailing Winter, and I imagined him receiving the messages, bleary-eyed, unshaven and road-weary as he hunched before a glimmering screen in yet another nondescript strip mall.

Somehow, I regarded those notes as important. I saw shades of America's future in Winter. I saw all of us ricocheting, ever faster, among shopping pavilions, and forgetting, a little more every day, about the land beneath us, about what it means to stay in one place and know it, and about the simple pleasure of stopping and talking to someone. It gave me faith to know that even Winter appreciated some human connection. And I was not the only one who found hope in his gestures of romance.

From her bedroom in Springfield, in the small white clapboard house that she shares with her mother, Jodi, who has a master's degree in public relations, was now making intricate preparations for her first meeting with Winter. The date was set for early June, at a Starbucks in Springfield. The State Journal-Register would be covering the rendezvous, and a radio station, WQLZ (92.7 FM), would also interview Jodi and Winter before the Internet lovebirds slipped out of Springfield for a gala long weekend: a night at the Extended StayAmerica near the St. Louis airport, a few Starbucks visits and then a Scrabble tournament in Indianapolis.

I flew in for the festivities. I took the Greyhound bus from St. Louis and met Jodi in Springfield, outside the terminal. She was wearing a black shirt and a khaki skirt. She had shed 40 pounds over the previous four months, and she'd had a new Scrabble necklace made for the occasion. This one bore the letter W. "I didn't get any sleep," she fretted. "I was too excited. Winter and I have been waiting so long to meet."

Winter arrived at the curb outside the cafe 15 minutes late. He was wired, having just whipped through five Starbucks outlets in Chicago that morning, and he approached Jodi shouting. "Hey, I'm here!" he said, waving his arms. They hugged, a bit awkwardly, and then, at a distance, the Journal-Register reporter, a photographer and I followed Winter inside, where he leaned toward Jodi and half-whispered into her ear. "If we stay here, you're going to have to buy me a drink."

All day long, Winter trampled rules of decorum. In midafternoon, as he and Jodi sat outside the Starbucks, he simultaneously played a game of Scrabble online and read a book. He did not look up for minutes at a stretch. "This woman I'm playing," he said, "she's so lucky." Later, when I showed up for a dinner coordinated by Jodi, I found Winter standing by the restaurant's entrance, reading a newspaper and making off-color remarks about the massage-parlor ads in the back. There was a fiftyish woman standing beside him -- a waitress, I thought at first. It was, in fact, Jodi's mother.

Winter was out of his element, but if you looked past the force field of his anxiety, you could discern that he was being, well, charming, by his standards. He kept teasing Jodi by making cutting remarks about Springfield, a sleepy burg where hundreds of tourists visit Abraham Lincoln's house every day after driving through dairy farms outside of town. "So," he said, "I guess they kind of downplay the assassination around here, eh? So do they roll up the sidewalk at night so the cows can graze at the Hilton?"

There was so much game flirtation, so much wisecrack joie de vivre, that Jodi just glowed. "Stop!" she shrieked when Winter ribbed her about the wealth of luggage she packed for Indianapolis. "I'm a girl!"

When the weekend was nearly over, Winter and Jodi sat side by side on a park bench for a few minutes, gazing out at a tranquil pond. Then they drove back to Jodi's, and she dissolved into tears. "I promised myself I wouldn't cry," she sniffled. "I didn't want to."

"Winter was uncomfortable," Jodi said later, "so he went into my house, to use the computer, and then he basically just grabbed his stuff and left." He kept going. In five days, he ripped through Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Oklahoma again, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada. He reached California and then drank coffee at 47 stores inside 31 waking hours. He told me: "I will never stop moving. If I even think about settling in one place, I get anxious."

But what lingered most was a certain wistful passage that appeared on Winter's blog on the day he parted with Jodi. "Schmoopie and I said our goodbyes," he wrote. "I would miss her, but I didn't cry. I was much too accustomed to leaving. Still, I would look forward to returning to Springfield, and not just because of the Starbucks that would be opening later in the summer."

Bill Donahue's most recent story for the Magazine, about Tangier, Morocco, will be republished this fall in Best American Travel Writing 2004.