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I can't get out of my head the image of Lisa Nowak, the lovesick NASA astronaut, driving 900 miles wearing a diaper.

The diaper detail stands above the rest, above her wig, above the implements of mayhem that police say she carried: "a compressed air pistol, a steel mallet, a knife, pepper spray, four feet of rubber tubing, latex gloves and garbage bags."

According to John Schwartz in The New York Times, "She is charged with the attempted murder of a woman who she believed to be her rival for the affections of a fellow astronaut. Police officials say she drove 900 miles to Florida from Texas, wearing a diaper so she would not have to stop for rest breaks."

Such was her crazed nonstop urgency that Lisa Nowak wore an adult diaper. A diaper.

As a reader and a writer, I wonder about that diaper. I imagine such a diaper as heroic armor in the iconography of space travel. In the confinement of space suit, capsule, shuttle, and space station -- bodily functions monitored by the nanosecond -- the diaper becomes the loincloth of the space gladiator, an emblem of training, self-control, discipline. Of mission.

Mission control.

The troubled space cadet brought a diseased version of that mission to land travel. She got in a car. Wore a wig, not a helmet. Headed east. Drove 900 miles. (Did she stop for refueling? Did she have something to drink?) She traveled with instruments. And she wore a diaper. A small step -- it appears -- from heroism to madness.

What makes the diaper a great detail? I'm struggling to understand. Perhaps it's the diaper's gritty specificity. Or the way it defines character. Or the way it stands as a symbol of the protagonist's tragic flaws. Or the way it marks the orbit of her narrative from the apogee of heavenly exploration to the perigee of piss and shit.

[If you agree, what makes the diaper a great detail? Can you think of any similar great details from stories you've written or read?]

-- Roy Peter Clark