This week John Yau connects toxic tires poisoning Coho salmon in the Northwest, Kerouac’s famous 120-foot scroll on which he composed On the Road, and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” a piece produced by driving a Model A Ford over twenty sheets of paper.

As he threads relationships both obvious and less so, he broods upon the nature of life’s progress: “We see only part of the path taken, not what was seen, all of which no longer exists. The beginning and end of the journey are beyond our vision; we see only what is in front of us.”

Year’s end is often a time of reckoning, of understanding what needs to be done as we are overtaken by relentless now. The recent past has been, well, rather awful. And what’s immediately to come perhaps not much better. But we might pause at this uncertain moment to relish what is good and to carry that goodness forward on this unknowable journey.