" I had expected my travels to be picaresque, teeming with wise, bizarre or menacing outlaw characters. At the very least, I had imagined that without really trying I would meet dozens of people of Pittsburgh Ed’s sterling caliber. In fact my various odysseys were haunted by absence, with only here and there a few lost voices such as Cinders’s or Ed’s singing about the way things used to be back then, as if they were crickets who had inexplicably outlived their summer. "

― William T. Vollmann , Riding Toward Everywhere