Column: Dowsing Rods

The beautiful thing about England, I thought, was that with a rail pass you could get just about anywhere in the country within a few hours. That was before I got there, of course. I hadn’t plotted the courses to the places I needed to visit in any great detail; I assumed that England, having an actual public transit system, would lead me anywhere I liked with no great effort on my part. Experience had proved otherwise. Two weeks into my trip, I had learned that if a map could be misread, I would misread it, and if a timetable could be missed, I would miss it.