Somewhere locked in geostationary orbit over Virginia, a satellite maintains its dumb stare. Prompt it with a series of numbers and you can provoke it to produce pictures of Jefferson’s Monticello or that place you and your friends used to sneak off to by the Rapidan. 38.24521°N, 78.11247°W gets you to a concrete alley back of a post office loading dock.

The satellite looks down, but once your thirteen-year-old eyes were looking up from that alley. Feet freezing in your too-tight shoes, slipping through the gray slush of a melting snow pile. Freedom on a Sunday morning being the ten minute window between Mr. Goddin’s youth class and 11 a.m. worship. And you used it to slink here.

Your seventh grade Twain-addled brain imagined too much about what the town contained. Why, you wondered from your stolen observatory, couldn’t it be Hannibal and you Tom Sawyer? Weren’t the conversations in your science lab as laced with universal wit as his? And why shouldn’t you write it all up, commandeering your father’s IBM Selectric II and watching its golf ball innards whirl to setting type and words and worlds?

The man looks back at the lone child and sees only Walt Whitman’s spider launching ‘filament, filament, filament,’ praying a thread will catch somewhere ‘in measureless oceans of space.’ He wonders how it could have felt so alive to seek even more isolation from which to shoot these tendrils, chasing purchase and a web.

He pities the child but he has never left the alley himself. He has seen things. Has even traveled to far-off places where pieces of himself appeared without him knowing just how. The edge of the Atlantic from an Iron Age fort on a Scottish isle that has remained in his mind like an eagle eyrie. The West Texas pump jacks whining a soul-altering tune in the setting sun that he hums at the end of every day. The electric space between his face and the red-headed girl who whirled into his life at a clogging class.

But the man is no better judge of the child in the alley than the satellite with its CIA lenses. Like the child, he can be described from without, identified in high resolution, but never fully known. Even to himself.

What can’t be clear to the observer, however diligent, is the beauty born that wet day that resists every marked location and sentimental lament. You want to see the seething, teeming creation? Lose the distance—temporal or orbital. Climb back into the alley and take a look around.

Alex Joyner knows a lot of alleys around Central Virginia. He is a writer and United Methodist pastor working in Charlottesville, Va. Previously he has served churches in Texas, England, and Virginia’s Eastern Shore.