I don't know, I've never been here before

'I don't know, I've never been here before.'

That's what we like to say to one another when traveling in places that are new to us, should either one of us ask, 'where are we?'

There were whitecaps on The Delta, and the wind was up as we left the town of Rio Vista. We'd have to cross many bridges and take at least two ferries. That's all I knew, and she didn't know any more.

For the most part the roads were decent blacktop, not many cars, and we saw countryside that was pleasingly flat and empty and filled to the gills with water. The number of boats, many more boats than cars--the overwhelming majority of the boats docked in small sleepy marinas--was surprising to us, as were the quaint little towns of Isleton and Locke.

Sometimes, if I didn't know where I was I could believe I was in rural France, beside the Loire, sometimes in the swampland of northern Florida. Most often the landscape was worth seeing, with some encroachments by piles of rusting marine parts and trailer parks almost hidden by stands of dusty cottonwood trees emitting their peculiar chemical redolent of meth labs and grazing sheep.

It became clear as we continued that she knew where we were more than I, so she did more of the leading, though she'd never been here before.

Every once in awhile we'd come to a crossroads, with a field of corn on one side, a grove of plum trees on the other, and the high bank of the levee in the immediate distance.

All we knew at such a time is that we were somewhere in the watery kingdom of the Sacramento Delta in the great state of California. Other than knowing that neither of us knew where we were.

At such a time there can't be one leader, there has to be a consensus and then one of the leaders must follow.