It has been a foolish day, the sort that settles over travelers once the miles have outrun the sense and the scenery has worn the mind down to a soft, agreeable pulp. Ordinary things stop being themselves and take up whatever occupation the exhausted fancy assigns them.

A fence post becomes a solemn gentleman in waiting. A bush turns into a bear of uncertain temper. A road sign grows accusatory. And a rolled hay bale, with perfect seriousness, becomes a cinnamon bun of the highest order, the kind that might once have sat proudly in a bakery window before civilization declined and bakers forgot the difference between flour and forage.

Such is how we found ourselves as we drove along the coast of Southern Oregon.

We first noticed our general collapse of intellect when we came upon a jackass standing in a field, wearing a bright red fly mask with the air of a man who has just been elected mayor by people who never met him and never intend to. The mask lent him a theatrical dignity that was hard to ignore, as though he had studied under some great actor and then decided politics offered better pay, fewer rehearsals, and no auditions.

One of our company announced at once that the creature resembled the Mexican wrestler Lucho Libra. Now, I have never laid eyes on Lucho Libra, and I am not prepared to swear to the spelling, yet after several days of travel a man learns not to dispute these revelations.

He merely nods with the gravity of a philosopher who has seen worse and waits for the next absurdity to present itself, which it always does, and usually with a flourish. Then we saw the jackass was perched atop a large rolled bale of hay.

At that moment civilization took a quiet step backward, the kind it has been taking with increasing frequency of late, as though progress itself had grown weary of the climb and decided to rest a while in the ditch. Someone looked upon that several-hundred-pound cylinder of dried grass and saw, clear as day, a cinnamon bun.

I cannot say precisely what degree of hunger produces such visions, but I understand the process thoroughly. Prolonged travel works strange conversions upon the appetite.

Mountains become potatoes. Clouds become mashed potatoes with gravy. Distant barns turn into loaves of bread. Fence lines become strings of sausages, and a vast cylinder of hay becomes something one might reasonably expect to find under a layer of icing in a respectable bakery, provided the baker had lost his mind.

The jackass remained motionless upon its imaginary pastry, surveying the landscape with the composure of a politician who knows the public is watching and has already calculated the votes, the graft, and the probable length of the investigation. He stood there as if the entire arrangement had been planned for our benefit, or perhaps for some higher authority that enjoys a good joke at the expense of the human race.

Then came the final contribution to our intellectual ruin.

Someone suggested the animal was defending itself against Sasquash—not Squatch, mind you, but Squash. I pictured the scene at once: a red-masked jackass standing bravely upon a cinnamon bun, holding the pass against a giant wilderness squash of questionable character and worse intentions.

The spectacle would have astonished science, embarrassed zoology, and secured a federal grant without difficulty or evidence. Committees would have been formed. Papers would have been written, and photographs taken and later denied. The Squash, I have no doubt, would have received a pension.

By this time we had abandoned every pretense of seriousness. The jackass stared at us with what I took to be quiet contempt, the look a seasoned politician gives a crowd that has just cheered the wrong slogan.

We stared at the jackass. Somewhere in the distance, I imagine a genuine Sasquatch watching and wondering why the authorities permit people to travel without proper adult supervision, or at least without a competent referee and a supply of smelling salts.

The creature must have shaken its head and returned to the woods, preferring the company of ordinary bears and honest timber to folks who mistake hay for pastry and livestock for professional athletes.

I have reflected upon the matter at some length since, and I find that travel produces these effects with remarkable consistency. The longer one sits in a vehicle, the more the mind begins to rearrange the world according to its own failing judgment.

A distant silo becomes a monument to lost causes. A flock of crows becomes a committee in session. A puddle becomes an ocean, and a jackass in a red mask becomes the most dignified figure on the horizon.

Hunger sharpens the process. Fatigue completes it.

Between the two, folks can imagine an entire banquet and a circus at the same time, and still find the conversion reasonable under the circumstances.

The jackass, for its part, never moved. It continued to occupy its cinnamon bun with the calm of one who has accepted his destiny and sees no need to explain it.

Perhaps it understood that we were temporary visitors in its domain, passing through with our peculiar notions and our empty stomachs. Perhaps it pitied us. Or perhaps it was simply waiting for the next carload of fools to arrive and furnish fresh entertainment. In any case, it held its ground, and we eventually moved on, carrying the memory of a sight that no respectable history will ever record.

And so I arrive at the only conclusion left standing: we are exhausted. Not the ordinary tiredness that sleep will cure, but the profound variety that turns livestock into professional wrestlers, hay into pastries, and legendary monsters into vegetables of alarming size and doubtful loyalty.

Travel, it is said, broadens the mind. Ours has broadened so thoroughly that it has simply fallen off the map and is now rolling about the countryside looking for a cinnamon bun of its own.

If such a bun exists, may I never find it. I have seen enough for one journey, and the mind, once expanded to this degree, is better left to shrink back to its natural size before it begins nominating fence posts for public office.