BOOK IV:
AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

The metamorphosis of nature shows itself in nothing more than this: that there is no word in our language that cannot become typical to us of nature by giving it emphasis. The world is a dancer: it is a Rosary; it is a torrent: it is a Boat: a Mist, a Spider’s Snare; it is what you will; and the metaphor will hold…. Swifter than light the World transforms itself into the thing you name.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

55.

Where is it, really, that Sally’s going with her euphoric outcries and her zeal—off to
some fortunate island? North to a new world? Once it was the west they traveled toward, that wave of humans barging in on North America. They saw the Appalachian ranges as barriers to be overcome—just cut a wagon road, dig a canal, blast a tunnel through. We go westward, Henry Thoreau wrote, as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. Even his arrowhead-sharp
eyes did not perceive where so much enterprise, and its detritus, would take us in the end. Lackadaddy, that tale of westering’s done with now. Whitman cried out that we could sail to India, but few booked passage. When Kerouac hit the Pacific coast, he turned around. Sally arcs north and east instead, up through the Shenandoah Valley, in the lee of mountains whose fundamental structure runs to Newfoundland. She’s unsuspecting, curious, heading (as far as she knows) for the past. This switcheroo on a tattered national narrative has its allure. “Romantic Writers in New England: Traces, Erasures, Counter-Inscriptions”—that’s what she called the essay in her application for the travel-fellowship. The crafty title means she can visit just about any literary pilgrimage site she wants to. For eager, reeling Sally, the project offers exploration of a cosmos well away from Alloway. It also means a leap out of a fine kettle of hot water.
But not from frying pan to fire. At least, she’s fairly sure of that.

Look now! The slow Potomac gleams beneath the four-lane bridge beneath the
Yo-truck’s wheels beneath her. She has lost a husband, saved a tree, learned from Ess and the other body-painted protesters that she can be braver than she thought. Without her recent new experiences—saluting the sun at the House of Yoga, scribbling poetry on Caledonia’s neat concrete—without these, she wonders, would she have the moxie to be off and running, a frisky groundhog on the loose? Noah’s desirous labyrinth she has left for sure behind. Still, Sally tells herself, he did get her to understand it isn’t self-indulgence to buy food grown organically and close to home. It’s for Val’s children, Ess’s, for the immediate common good. So thank you kindly, Noah Moore. Her fingers prance on the steering wheel. Also for position
seventeen. My, yes.
As for the tire fire and who set it, or what Hank Q’s unearthed about that foul dump’s ownership—these things, Sally does not want to know. And she most certainly doesn’t want to talk with him. Why, she’d as soon sit down for a heart-to-heart with snarling Arjay. Instead, she wants, she wants… Whatever it is, she’ll find it. She drives through central Pennsylvania, bent on swinging wide round Yorkadeltimorington’s miasma. Near the ghostly Susquehanna, traffic slows, rolls forward in hitchy-twitchy stops and starts. Harrisburg sprawls beyond the interstate’s narrow shifting backed-up lanes, the flashing temporary signage, concrete barriers, the perturbing merging, wide-strewn wreckage, crawling pressing trucks. Hours later, the construction jam-up eases. Decision point: the right hand road leads on to hungry urban fens; Sally takes the left. Unchecked, she angles into highlands, heading on north through coal country, cutting across the pleated rockbeds’ grain. She

wants to see what she can see in this old new world.
Frackville, Hazelton, Wilkes-Barre: strung-out towns where miners’ grandkids watch their jobs get shipped to countries in which factory owners may do entirely as they please. Sally spots neon crosses, admonitory road-signs—she’s never seen a state so flat- out bossy—and billboards touting whorehouses in thin disguise. What gives her joy, as the Yo-truck tools along at 70, is the trees. That’s what she wants. More green trees.
Back in Virginia and south central Pea-A, signs of drought were clear: early September, leaves already browned. Up here in the heights, however, as the interstate traverses ridge on ridge, things look better to Sally’s eye. Spindly aspens fill the roadside. The tulip trees and sweet gums have thinned out. Oaks no longer dominate. Beeches and the winsome birches come into their own. In the windgaps, the trunks grow short and sparse. But the same efficient nets are spread to catch light’s energy.
Cars too are sparse now. Yet a passing BMW drifts into her lane, nearly clipping her front fender. Its flag looks weary, and Osama’s still not caught. Head moving like a dribbled basketball, and just as empty, the driver’s bopping to music she can’t hear. How come, Sally asks herself, I never thought for all those years? Truth is, she did, but: so much at hand to think about! Two kids and their cavalcade of after-school activities. The volunteer work. All that checking in on Mama—cleaning up, negotiating Meals on Wheels. Then daily runs to the nursing home, to the gym so she could sleep at night, and after that the crash of grief, the paperwork. Next, she gave herself to the parading urgencies of college. Except for the first awful

days after 9/11, she was too busy studying, and keeping house, to pay attention to the
news. Her head felt so full she never let her mind fall back for a wider view. It was like the slagheaps under aspens screening business parks laid out on ruined land near Minersville: distracted by these roadside trees, Sally hardly registers what lies beyond. That’s how things were, really, from the time she started dating Dickie. With so many trunks and branches crowding close, it’s hard to notice that half the forest’s gone. But, oh, why trouble herself today with that? She’s gone gone gone from suburb- burdened Alloway. This northward drive resembles a beeline west, up to higher country she used to gaze toward from her deck. The kinship of these mountains to the best parts of her early years—walks with Papaw, Scout camp, Sunday drives with Daddy at the wheel—catches her up. A humming exhilaration instills itself within her. The truck’s tires roll. Her old life shrinks. Hank Q is no more to her than last fall’s maple leaf. After hours of solitary driving (something she’s never done before and never thought she could), Sally releases one long throaty Om. Ah, oh, if they could hear her at the House of Yoga now.
She takes in air, drops her voice, draws the sound out: Aaaoooommmmm. For ten minutes (right there in the truck-cab where no one, no one visible, can listen) she chants: Om. Om, Om. She decides she wants more oms in her life, as well.
Next morning near the New York border, at Great Bend (so beautiful, this flash of the coolly winding Susquehanna) a wind starts up. Branches quiver. Sally’s about to cross the Catskills. She’ll continue east, over the Taconics and their green companions. Her first goal’s one lone nub of rock rising out of south New Hampshire’s rolling plain. Mount Monadnock. She’ll climb it, or go bust.

A chancy vow but—surely?—not too difficult. Hardy Brownie troops have done
it. Well before the First World War, women climbed in skirts so long and thick they tangled in the brush, had to be cut free with jackknives. But climb they did. Concerts have been played on that wide bare summit; leotard-ed dancers have braved the gusting winds. The second time Thoreau went there, he camped in a hollow for a week. Took his umbrella, and eighteen hard-boiled eggs. Made himself at home. Will she? Emerson called the mountain inspirer and prophet and aerial isle. New England waits, a wise-witch grandma she has never met. These northern mountains are still her mountains. And are not. No need to think about the long term—what Hank knows or doesn’t know, what happens when her cash runs out. Or how to tend to responsibilities that even the trees around her say are hers.

56.

On Blue Ridge peaks and the long run of the Alleghenies, south from Alloway in the
Great Smokies and the Nantahalas, north among the Green and White and the Canadian
ranges, rainfall—when the drought allows it—burns the lakes and creeks. Trout die or
lose capacity to reproduce. Insects die, and crayfish. Those salamanders who survive
lay eggs in pools now made so mordant that most never hatch.
The birds and mammals who eat these creatures diminish too.
This new rain weakens trees’ resistance to bacteria, fungi, hungry bugs, effects of
cold. It slaughters tiny organisms that would have changed the fallen leaves and wood
and needles into fertile beds for seedlings. Its acid releases toxic heavy metals.
Aluminum once locked in compounds in the soil is let loose. It chokes roots.
Nutrients leech out. When enough have gone, no forest can grow back.
And so on. Corrosive ponds are cleared by lifelessness. Sour fogs scald fragrant
spruce. The sugar maples go. A ruthless insect moves in, starts drinking sap. Soon
barkless trunks of Fraser firs, found only on these hilltops, form a grey necropolis.
Every car and every truck exhales caustic oxides of nitrogen. The conversion of
archaic swamps into electric power, the factory smokestacks that rise triumphant over
lackadaisical regulations, the algae fed by out-washed fertilizers—these also play their
parts in forests’ death-by-chemical-searing.
But for the moment, never mind the causes. Rejoice a moment, if you can, in the
high green country. The question is: as this continues, how shall we live our lives?

57.

And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that
were to come are too fantastic not to tell. That is what I kept thinking as I drove.
What I saw as I crossed the Mason-Dixon was, I swear, this bumper sticker: Are you on the road to My house?—God. Well, yes and no, I figured. For one thing, it has
never seemed to me that a limited-access highway is the best route to that destination. Maybe that explains why I joined up with the Unitarians and Universalists. Behind me: the Elks Club swimming pool. A mall where they’d painted red and blue stripes beside the white ones in the middle of the access road, after the twin towers fell. Also, some creepy…haint that was surely nothing in this world but a figment of my stress. A valley shrouded by rubbery poison smoke. One poke-nosed starry-eyed reporter.
Behind me: Dickie. Plus fearsome old Arjay, hovering heavily back of him. Ahead: a Once-New World, that one-time brand-new England. A place of clean starts, possibly including one for me. A place to pay my respects to ghosts who helped to make me what I am. Whatever that is. I was surely hoping to find out. They taught us mostly Yankee books in school when I was coming up, except the one teacher who assigned us Alice Walker and Harper Lee. I do read everything by Jill McCorkle or Lee Smith first chance I get. But truth is, Walden Pond means as much to me as Altamont or Yoknapatawpha County. And if Queenborough and Poorwater mean

the most—well, I was born and raised smack dab between the two. High time to take
myself to someplace else.
I’ve heard Pennsylvania’s the only state imports more garbage than Virginia. Maybe this explains the hunkered-down look of the other grocery shoppers in the SupaPharma Homefolks’ OmniMart near Scranton. That first night, I slept in a motel off I-81, too worn out from battling traffic to care that I could not afford it. I woke up with a picture in my head: Hank Q playing “Where have all the flowers gone?” on a guitar the color of the early September sky.
But I was shut of him, was I not?
The second day, I finally grasped the workings of those big old rivers of ice that did not carpetbag as far as Alloway. Valleys far below me cupped doll-house towns, glacier-carved into great big U’s, not V’s. Up along the road, fuchsia-colored blossoms crowded the drainage ditches. Real pretty, I thought, electric purple-pink against the scattered goldenrod and daisies, the hillsides’ blues. Just: pretty. At a rest-area welcome station near Oneonta, the old man behind the counter told me it was loosestrife. Looked at me funny when he said it. Later, passing one more full- to-bursting ditch, I recollected what I’d read when I was using garden magazines to fill my head in the orthodontist’s waiting room. Purple loosestrife is bumptious as all get- out, escaped from flower beds and crowding out the native plants. At Caledonia, I took Intro to Environmental Science. Before that, pretty would have done me fine. Now, looking at those ruffly spikes made me purely sad. East of Troy and freed of superhighways, I rolled onto the continent of New England, first time in my life. Here’s what else lay behind me: years. I was moving into

the second half of my personal soccer game.
The ups and downs of south Vermont came slow. A funny pleasure crept up on me—to be back among rooted homes after the push-through interstates, on map-lines plowed where no one lives.
A flagger stopped the car ahead of me. Soon the line behind us stretched out long. Another crew was deepening the roadcut, adding on a lane. Third one today. Most folks left their engines running, like that might get them rolling sooner. The flagger flipped her sign. I turned the key, drove past westbounders stacked up at the far end of work zone. No getting round the butchery of that bypass back in Alloway, I thought. Unless…well, we plain need to need less cars. Now you hold on a minute, Sally Ellen, I told myself when I heard those words in
my head. You sound like that damfool unrealistic Hank Q. The Yo-truck chugged on. High-flying bridge into New Hampshire. I skimmed the could-be-anywhere strip of ticky-tacky south of Keene. There, I saw the thing at last. Monadnock. Honestly, the mountain was not a staggering sight on this hazy day, not with gas stations, traffic lights, strip-mall outpads filling up the foreground. Still, as I drove toward the state park campground, my eyes kept veering toward it. Tomorrow, I’d know what the shattered peak of the mountain had to say—and mercy knows that turned out true, in some kind of way.
But it was never height that marked Monadnock, really. It is what you might call a singularity, a hill with no other hills around it. That’s what the word means in the Abenaki language, and the settlers took the name when they grabbed the land. Malthus told me that, about what “monadnock” means—Malthus, the park ranger with a

strawberry blond soul-patch on his chin and Listen to Leonard tattooed on his arm. Nice
young man, I thought, back then. He did let me pick my campsite before I paid.
The birch trees shining in the woods around my tent reminded me I’d come a piece from Alloway. Squirrels skittered small and reddish, not like the squirrels back home. I drove into the village, ate spaghetti while the jukebox played—I would not lie about this—Patsy Kline. I read the geology guide I’d bought on a coffee stop. Come to find out, that last ridge west of Keene used to be a volcanic island, crushed when the drifting land off east crashed into the core of North America. I liked how small and young that made me feel. Back at the campground, I stored the bread I’d saved from dinner in my car, along with a Dr. Pepper for the morning. I was set on hiking, not on cooking, and the little park store did not open until ten. Judging by the forecast chalked outside the rangers’ office, the quicker I got to the peak, the better the views would be. And the quicker off it, the less chance of getting caught by rain. Even in summer, you do not want to be traipsing around up there in a rainstorm, or in fog. Soon I would be feeling lonesome and uprooted, sooner than that even, scared. But that night my troubles looked to be roosting about a thousand miles away. Lying in my tent, hearing the tall thin aspens rustle, I felt purely free.

58.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
whozzis dood?

maah—dunno when you’ll pick this up, but some reporter from alloway tracked down my e-dress. sez he found my name in that big story about the mayday demo, looking through the paper’s morgue (charming word, yo) & figured we’re related. so should i tell him where you are?
too bad you got Val’s machine when you called from pencil-vein-ya. like i wrote yesterday: yr whole trip sounds uber-cool. go go go. hope the Toyota’s holding up.
me, i go froth some more tall skinnies in about two minutes but so sorry, i don’t miss school. got some real friends now. tomorrow we do a thai ritual to ordain this humongous bristlecone pine tree as a buddhist monk. gotta stop the slaughter somehow. big
oodley
huggies,
ess

59.

“Gud mor-ining!”

Sally’s walking toward the state park’s bathrooms when she hears this. She just passed a shiny dumpling of a trailer, then a dome-tent and a patchy van whose North Carolina license plate announces KRSNA. The Ford that pulls the trailer had its own special-order plates—F&A USA. New York. Life, she thinks, in these United States. And being a Virginian, adds: Note plural.

Midweek, after Labor Day—the mostly-empty campground’s hushed. The greeting came from a bushy-chinned man who’s got a campfire going. He drove in late, in his nondescript sedan; looks like he slept in the back seat. Sally lifts a circumspect hand, takes care not to break stride. On the swing-back, she makes sure she doesn’t see him. This guy could be…anything.

Never mind him. Today, today, she’s climbing the most-climbed mountain in the world. It’s like being about to open a book she’s wanted to read for ages. She stretches, eats her dry bread, drinks her Dr. Pepper, fills her daypack. Two lines from a long poem Emerson started on the summit of Monadnock keep tintinnabulating in her head:

For the world was built in order,

And the atoms march in tune.
The mountain told the poet that, so he assures us. Sally’s willing to believe him. It’s only that she feels a little jealous. He’s so certain about what’s what.

But forget that self-reliant maverick and the burly twenty-first century camper with his non-native speaker accent. Malthus gave her a trail map yesterday—a drunken spiderweb of paths imposed atop the mountain’s contour lines. Also, a run-down on the route he recommended: White Dot Trail to Cascade Link, across the slope a little way on that one, then Red Spot’s steep climb, hooking up with Pumpelly Trail just before it hits three thousand feet, to cross the final open flats; after the summit, short-cut down on White Dot to White Cross to Spruce Link and then the last half-mile on the starting stretch of White Dot once again.
“Piece-a-cake,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered.

Yuh, he’d heard rain was moving in. Best be off the mountain before noon. Could get bad up there.

She starts the broad beginning pathway through the beeches. She wants to hit the peak in time to see all six New England states. From the look of the sky, she maybe won’t.
She’s also stepping out in hopes that she can shake, if not Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thumping meter, then the dream she had last night.

A dream of…someone. Surely Noah. A randy, limber sex-dream, involving a ropy hammock inspired, she figured out when the cold water hit her face, by the cobweb on her Monadnock map.
The slope turns upward. Sally wonders what it’s like to be Noah Moore, so ruled by desires he constructs a mesh of rules to snare them. To be Dickie, always seeking some woman’s reassurance that he’s not just a big man’s little sib. Or Anji, who seems walled off, deep down, from the sexual turmoil she stirs up. Or bitter Yvvie or even Ess,

who leaps with gusto, but eases off alone.

Sally’s breath moves faster with exertion. She doesn’t want to be like them. She’s had those early years of awkward ardor, had the long exhausted maternal decades, and now she’s tried Just Fun. How can she get more gumption, get to bliss?

But look. He’s up ahead of her, carrying a large rucksack. Mister (Comrade? Gosopodin? and what would that be in Arabic?) Gud-Mor-ining.

First thing Sally asks herself is, can she pass him? Answer: easy.

The second is, Am I afraid to? Answer: I am done with fear.

Third—and quickly—comes the tough one. Does she feel differently about this lone man in the woods because his language and his looks mark him as belonging to another tribe?

Answer: No, of course not. Check the i.d.—Lone Man in the Woods. She’d bustle by the same way if this swarthy man had the pre-melanomic pallor of her Celtic cousins.

Answer again: On the other hand, you asked yourself the question, girl.

Final answer: Assume nothing. But get your fanny into higher gear.

So Sally picks it up, passes him on the inside of a curve, where the over-trodden path’s an easy eight feet wide. She smiles, eyes skidding sideways. Says, “We’ll see you up there.” It feels like tippy-toeing round Arjay on one of his unpleasant days.

She lopes uphill, rock after rock, careful to choose firm footing on the scree. Crossing a streamlet, she slips, comes up with a bruise-egg throbbing on one thigh. On she hustles, not letting herself look back. How beautiful, she thinks, the sunlight sliding through the spruce grove. Look,

look: how beautiful. Come on—look.

Side path. View break. Jutting ledge. Sally’s winded, and a little shaken by her fall. She’s never hiked alone except last May—what if she’d broken something? But the panorama soothes her, even with those clouds now hemming the horizon. Got here on my own, she thinks. No internal combustion engine. No one to hold my hand.

She celebrates with a pull of water from her bottle. Then, leaving her daypack on the rock-shelf, Sally crosses the main trail and steps on through the underbrush to a private spot. Her animal nature rules her as she squats to empty out her bladder. Her sweat-soaked t-shirt cools against her back. Wind’s picking up. A white-throated sparrow zings its sharp clear whistle.

Not eight feet from Sally’s pack when she returns to it: he stands there. Admiring the view. Mr. Bearded Tortoise has caught up with five-foot-tall Ms. Hare. “Hallo,” he says. “I have asked myself, does this belong to you?”

Lone Man in the libidinous, shadowy, fecund Woods. Snatching her daypack and
her jacket, Sally pastes on a grin, allows as how they do, points out that the scenery is pretty, that it sure might rain this afternoon, that it’s not raining yet. The tortoise knows these things. He returns to his camera, observing with quizzical dignity as she heaves the pack on her shoulders, waves cheerily, scuttles off.

Too bad. She could have used a rest. But Sally scrambles onward, pushing harder, to the scrubland of the high plateau. Here, there’s little sense of pathway. It’s a metamorphic jumble of schist and quartzite, the old rocks streaked by magma forced into cracks and cooled, the non-trail marked with painted arrows here and there. Sometimes the best footing’s up a cleft.

Her palms scrape. Has the sky grown darker? She casts about for the next cairn
piled up to show the way, half-staggering in her haste. Wherever anything can set down roots between bare rocks, below the winds, some green thing does: mosses, rhodora, battered hungry moosewood, tufts of grass, sedges in the low spots, dwarfed mountain ash trees. But fires set by nineteenth-century farmers burned off the forest, so the soil has mostly washed away.

The wind keeps coming at her. She doesn’t see the red-spotted newts who dive for cover at her approach. She careens from rock to rock across the enormous rock. Returned to a view of the summit—which has been bobbing, ducking, reemerging all along the last half-mile—Sally stands on a boulder for a look. Halloos greet her: a dozen action-figures cavort up there. But no, no one shouts to her. Breathe, she orders. You’re going faster than you need to, getting crazy. Didn’t eat a proper breakfast, missy. Does she black out for an instant? Is her body caught by a shear of wind? One moment, she’s rolling her shoulders, loosening up. The next she’s mid-air, plunging. Then she’s landing hip-first in a pocket where rainfall pools and gathers rotting leaves. Saved by the mud.
For it is, by luck, more muck than gravel, the spot she lands in. Her fall, by luck, is only seven feet. Her skeleton survives. Her jeans were dirty anyway. Sally pops up, looks to see if anybody’s seen her. Wouldn’t want to worry them. One man atop the peak is staring in her direction, so Sally waves as if to someone off at another angle: Just peachy here, y’all. Practicing my mountain-somersaults, tra la. Her final clamber’s filled with more hallooing. The number of action figures grows. Picking her way among the up-turned layers of stone, stopping now and then to

touch a vein of crystalline white or a few tarry mineral needles, she steps more slowly,
cautious now. Knows she climbed under two thousand feet, is all. Never quite knows which hump is the summit point. Here’s why. Crews of middle-schoolers and walkie-talkie bearing chaperones swarm from crest to crest, exultant, wired. Maybe there’s a summit-marker under one or another cluster of kids, but Sally can’t imagine diving in among them to find out. She shifts around, stares at the monochromatic sky, the filmed-over fields and ponds and roads. The wind stops blowing. “Thomas!” someone bellows. “Get your young butt over here. We’re taking the group picture.” It no longer feels like rain is moving in. Tomorrow, possibly. But what’s to see? Not six states. Two or three. She detects no reason to stick around.
Over there. Mr. Tortoise stands with his back to the largest clot of innocent
awful shrieking kids. Sally lifts a hand in greeting. He smiles, ironic and accepting, cocking an eyebrow toward the hormone-spiked hoard. At that, she knows him for what he is: an intelligent and harmless man who wanted nothing from her save “Gud mor- ining.”
“Ah, solitude,” says Sally, taking a chance. He knows the word. Tilts his head. “They must learn about such places,” he says, “your young fellow citizens. Nature literacy, isn’t it? They will vote, in time.” With that, he’s done, and turns away. Scattered across the lumpy summit, other adults thumb numbers into cell phones. One asks his mom to guess where he’s calling from. His buddy messes with a handheld something she decides must be a GPS receiver. A raven soaring nearby croaks an indecipherable croak. This is the first time

Sally’s seen this in the out-of-doors—the phone link-ups, the satellite-beamed mapping
system (24 megabites of built-in memory, accurate within three meters, electronic compass and altimeter included). First time the words form in her head: the wilderness is gone.
First time she asks herself if she can really find it, whatever she climbed up here for. Asks if there never was a book of nature awaiting her perusal, or if it is no more. If it’s now a glitzed-up website impossible to read for cross-signals fuzzing the connection, for commercial pop-up boxes blossoming like purple loosestrife, for the techno-glitches locking up her screen.

60.

After the first drop from the summit, I stopped short. Those rackety kids were
railroading me down too soon. No, that was me. Anyway, better to stick around a while, somewhere out of the wind, before heading on to my tent. Or should I trudge back to the peak, now that the commotion had died down?

I found a hollow filled with blueberry bushes and some azalea-bush-looking things, their leaves already starting to turn red. Up here, summer was giving way to fall. I sat in half-lotus, surrounded by lichens—old mountaineers making their homes where no one else could. Able to go dry for months, born again with the first rain.

A couple or three busses’ worth of kids started straggling downhill past me on the nearby trail, some needing a teacher to buck them up, but most laughing and chattering to beat the band. One marching boy, one charging girl reminded me of Val and Ess. Only younger. And so many—would they all have children of their own? Could Thoreau have imagined the U.S. with going-on three hundred million people in it? I could practically hear the next crop of babies, and behind them another and another, all hiking down that slope. That was the first time I wondered where, on this planet full of children, Val and Ess’s grandkids will be able to go, to sit in peace and learn what they are.
And me: would it really do me any good to see the peak again? On this trail, you had to go practically straight up. Thoreau said the views on Monadnock were not the

point—it was rocks. He sure enough got that one right.
Still, I was toting a backpack full of let-down. The fuss at the summit had fetched up a little wide of transcendental, and transcendental was what I was looking for just then. To distract myself, I wriggled one finger into a patch of moss, easing through browned-off stems and grit till I hit my same sitting-rock. A few itty-bitty plants poked up in that sponge-island’s center. But what were they surviving on? The moss’s downhill edge cut right across a splotch of lichen. I lifted it. The lichen’s buried half was dying off, turned chocolate-y and dampish, becoming muck. Then I got it: first the lichen, in the lee of the crack, slow and tough as anything. Given that foothold, moss sprang up, clinging onto snowmelt, catching pebbles and grains of dust. It built itself some dirt to eat. When the layer grew thicker, seeds could sprout like trees on an island’s high ground, roots grabbing more soil, maybe catching dry leaves from the bushes roundabout for mulch. Those little plants there in the center, they would bloom. Bugs would drop by; some would die here. How long till the first worm showed up? How long till Worm One met Worm Two, did whatever worms do to carry on their kind? Their waste, their lifeless bodies, the plants when they fell come winter, plus petals and maybe a feather or bird-do or a blown-in twig—my moss island was a continent a-building. Like the world’s first forest getting ready for a lungfish to galumph out of the sea. Like my baby Sara turning into Ess. Like me doing whatever I was doing here. A woman came round the bend in the trail below me, breathing deep, and stopped. I waved. She nodded, rose-cheeked, looking like a cover model for Modern Maturity. Her silver-fox husband joined her—slowed because he was keeping time with

their companion, a bony old lady over seventy if she was a day. Step-step-pause, she
went, leaning on her aluminum walking-stick. Step. Step-step. I admired her. I also wanted to push her into a rocking chair and wrap a quilt around her and tell her to stay put. She was going to make the summit, sensible and not worn out, without getting bruised or almost blown right off the mountain like a total nincompoop. And now the middle-schoolers were gone. These three would find Monadnock’s actual highest point. A little silence, too, could be. I do not like to sound mean-spirited. Hooray for them, I say. May they eat high- fiber lo-fat breakfasts for years to come. Only, after all those hollering kids, I truly did not need some hearty, papery-skinned old folks (excuse me: seniors) to show me the best—the best—the future holds for this body of mine. It was unsociable, I know, but I did not wave at the other two. Instead, I turned to look out into the cloudy non-view, the slice of it I could see from my hollow, letting them know I was absorbed in weighty English-major thoughts. My island was also like a cemetery, filling up. A cemetery where kids shriek, playing tag, maybe knocking a headstone over. Then grow up some and sneak back there to make love in the dark. I had my precious privacy for the pretty much the whole rest of the hike, which what with my bruised thigh from the slick rock and my sore hip from the fall off the boulder was, I have to say, real hard. The sharp downward trail called for constant giant- stepping, constant jolting, trying to guess which rocks were stable, which would teeter and likely pitch me off. Sometimes I guessed wrong. Better if I’d have run, or goat-hopped, dancing a mountain dance. But I was dragging. Soon, I sat again, so all worn out that before I knew it was happening, I started

to cry. That fall from the boulder had scared me more than I’d been willing to let on to
myself.
Alone on the trail, I thought—a cut-off creature. Forty-five and alone. A cloud moved somewhere overhead. Sunlight fell in a lichen-shape across the step-down rocks before me. I wiped my cheek with the back of my hand. A bird sang out. I could hear my mama saying I needed to rise above the situation. I could hear Daddy telling me it was time for the tough to get themselves a-going. I’d wanted an adventure. And did I not grab my thesaurus, the day I finished clearing out Mama’s house, and swear I was going to live with zest and verve and resolution? I blew my nose, stood up. Swept my arms out wide and overhead like I was about to do a yoga pose.
Air in. Release. That bird was almost bound to die before me. The rocks were
sure to outlast us both. I was a flea-bug on a mountain that is less than a doorknob on the planet. So…get into it.
I started hiking. As I started to my rhythm, Emerson’s poem about Mondanock came back in my head. Good. I’d let words carry me. I dredged up every poem I could: the H.D., one I memorized for Prof. Augenblick, the Richard Henry Wilde that Papaw taught me to recite and Mama’s favorite Poe, then an Elinor Wylie I latched onto for extra credit in ninth grade, and the George Garrett I’d learned just to please myself. Four lines into Millay’s Renascence, I went blank. Still, those poems kept me going, them and the chipmunks skittering full-tilt boogie over every downed log on the lower slope. I could have turned around up there, skipped the summit, I told myself. Could

have headed straight back to the Elks Club pool. But Thoreau said it takes more
endurance to stay indoors than go out walking. If the sun can make a lichen and moss can clothe a continent, I could finish out my saunter on this heap of rock and poems. And I would never eat cold white bread and Dr. Pepper for breakfast again. By now I was down to the softer, slower trail that meant I’d soon be in the campground. True—the mountain is not the sanctuary it was when the Abenaki made their camps there. But at least you can’t drive up it, and right now these woods were so peaceful that the chipmunks’ tail-high scurrying sounded downright neighborly. I did not notice any of them crying that she felt lonesome, or missed some messed-up guy- chipmunk, or was scared she might fall down. In the park store, Malthus brewed a fresh pot of coffee and I spent the best dollar of my life. I believe that is when I first picked up on how his eyes rolled skyward in their sockets every now and again. I recall for sure that he explained it then. “’Scuse me, miss. I meditate a lot, and sometimes… It’s nothing. You want milk in that?” I stumped over to a picnic table in the sunshine, knowing my foam cup was a sin, and loving every drop so much it did not matter, seemed like, that I will not live as long as the polystyrene will. By the time I finished with the shower house and the Visitor Center, the bearded hiker’s site was bare. Ciao, Bruno. Do svidaniia. Salaam. Sorry I let myself get scared of you when there was no reason for it.
My way lay clear before me. I was going to move through my life’s second half the way old Bruno climbed Monadnock. No leaps, no visions, no antsy kid-like spacing out. Over the crest, tune in to the bedrock and ease on down—that is how I’d take it, hoping for the soul’s equivalent of hot running water and caffeine at the end. Maybe my

hair would turn an attractive silver. Maybe I’d develop rosy cheeks. Maybe, just maybe,
I would stop chewing so hard on the knot called Sally P. But then: Revels! That is what the little poster outside the park store promised. I spotted it when I went back, wet-haired, to buy postcards—the gnarled peak for Ess, a blue-sky distance shot for Val.
HARVEST MOON REVELS
at the State Park Picnic Ground off Poole Road. ∞
Offered by
MOUNT MONADNOCK SPIRITUAL WELLNESS CENTER & the Dreaming Our Ancestors’ Rituals workshop led by Sylvia Daemonium Sensei. ∞
Come dance to the
REYKJAVIK SAMADHI FUSION BAND!
∞
Open to one and all. No charge.
Om Shanti. Hare Om.
∞ ∞ ∞
A sketch map beneath the time and date revealed that, whatever it was exactly, it would be happening that very night, right next to the picnic ground where I had sipped my coffee. My teacher Anna did her yoga training at the Mount Monadnock center, and she loved it. I’d come here with the notion I might check the place out. What better

chance than this?
Besides, how long since I’d gone dancing? These “revels” looked like a pile of nonsense. They looked to be what Dickie’d call downright dizzy. They looked like fun. No, the dizzy one was me. Turning away from the poster, I felt a sudden spinning. A wash-back from that falling moment on Monadnock I decided. Kind of strange.
It passed. Tired, and no wonder. I’d go nap in my tent, then heat myself some soup for dinner. A nice hot bowl of lentils and I could take on the world—or at least a bunch of crystal-kissers. And their dreamed-up ancestors, too.

61.

Things spiral up, or spiral down. Life brings life into existence, and (more miraculously,
really, than mere self-replication) makes new sites where other life can shelter, beings
emerging one on one on one like fractals or a tower of arabesques.
That, or it opens wounds that bleed like gullies.
An example of the former: the forest that slid northward from the southern
Appalachians as glacial ice receded. After the moss and lichens took bare-scraped rock,
tundra rose on sparse new soil. Then came rot-bottomed bogs, and shrubby nitrogen-
fixing alders, and seedlings of bold conifers. As these laid humus over parsimonious till
and gravel, the various leafy trees began to grow.
Water no longer knifed so quickly through the streambeds. It lingered in fallen
wood and rotting loam, juicy fodder for tiny species. It reeled through webs of root and
branch. Wetness fanned out, eddying, used and re-used, transpiring up into a greater
mass of clouds than can arise from ocean evaporation alone.
Life plaited a quick filigree from rainfall and the stuff of crumbled rocks.
Hydrogen, oxygen, minerals linked hands. They did their covalent jitterbug, their
molecular minuet, their wild organic waltz. Scoured stone became the revelry of the
eastern North American forest and its lively denizens.

62.

Bright, so bright, the risen moon. It cuts between the beeches; it fills the open glade.
Forms gather, as motley in their tie-dyed/spandex/organic-cotton/glitter-sprinkled clothing as in their belief systems—or the patchworked fragments they’ve latched onto. “We honor all mysteries,” says Sylvia Daemonium, self-named, and self-awarded that often hard-won title Sensei. “Take up whatever myths and rites may come to you by bloodline or by family teaching or by your own heart’s call.” A handy attitude, especially if you happen to hail from one of the low-charisma ethnic groups. You too can follow the ways of the Hopi, of Siberian shamans, and why not something from the Druids to boot? Perhaps in another lifetime, a parallel universe, you are or were all three. Or an ancient Egyptian, a Dionysius-worshipping Greek, if you insist. But they’re so early-twentieth century. Well, hell, there are worse attitudes than Sylvia’s. The terrestrial sphere is being homogenized faster than you can say Gimme a burger, a Coke®, and supersize the Levi’s®, please. Her samplings from the post-modern smorgasbord feed human hungers
better than the capitalist-consumer tricephalic deity, Getting / Spending / Laying Waste. Besides and truly, Sylvia knows that hunger. Yes, she’s a little pudgy, like the majority of her sad ravenous fellow citizens—but she’s as well acquainted as an anchorite with the soul’s dark night. Or at least, with quiet desperation. If you’re not born into a society with a single well-wrought frame of meaning, if you don’t stumble

onto one that suits, why not go eclectic? Every psyche needs its chow.
Tonight, a workshop’s worth of revelers gather in a clearing among the tall white pines. Most come to the Mount Mondanock Spiritual Wellness Center from more affluent locales. They’re joined by some of the odder denizens of southwest New Hampshire, such as that odd young ranger Malthus, although you wouldn’t recognize him now. Sally makes her way there in the gloaming, guided by drumbeats and a line of luminarias.
It’s quite a sight that meets her eyes. Bodies twist to plaintive music in moonlight abetted by a ring of lanterns, golden kerosene and blue-white Coleman intermixed. A tall person sheathed in sheaves of straw capers near a woman crowned with reindeer moss and spruce. A man in a loincloth, antlers branching above his skull, waves his hands high overhead. Sally lingers at a distance, a doe who sniffs the wind to see what’s what. The hour is darker, but the scene is not unlike Midsummer Eve at Mullins Cliffs. Except more jostly. Except: no Noah. No bonfire. No Pete. No anyone who knows her name. And surely, she’s a different Sally Paradiso now. If I had not seen those shenanigans back in June, she thinks, I might turn tail and run. Instead, she steps toward the liturgical mosh pit, ready to let the knots of the day untie, as she did years ago with her pre-Dickie boyfriend, the one who liked to dance. “Halt!”
A pole swings down to block the path, nearly catching Sally in the solar plexus. “Hang on a sec,” a second voice whispers from the shadows. “You need to— Over here, okay?”

Since the giant who holds that pole stands three feet taller than Sally does and
appears, now that she sees him, to be wrapped in vines (limbs and torso and bulbous mask-like head alike), she’s happy to sidestep toward the whisper. Not that she intends to chicken out. Open to all, the poster said. What’s a mere giant, after the air itself has knocked you off your feet?
Brief conference over, Sally thanks the whisper-girl, stands tall as possible and strides back toward the vine-wrapped wildman. His great green head is papier-mache. Sly-eyed and hollow, it rests atop his shoulders like a very large lampshade on a drunk. The pole drops swiftly as before. “Halt!” the giant cries. He seems to like the sound of this. “Halt!” he says again, identically, heedless of the fact that she’s already well and truly halted. “Why come you here?” “To greet the bright full moon of autumn,” Sally answers, snapping out the words she was just coached in.
“And after autumn?”
“Comes the winter, but…”
“But?”
Honestly, these Yankees sure can rush things. “John-Barleycorn-will-rise-again!” Sally hurls the sentence toward the limbless sapling that bars her way. “Aye. John Barleycorn will rise.” The pole lifts like a railroad-crossing gate, pale bark glinting in a shaft of moonlight. A red thread bracelets the giant’s bony wrist. Sally nods and smiles a passive-aggressive radiance into the shadows. The shadows wheeze, “Super! Enjoy!”
Ah, but the dancing’s fun, even if the music strikes her as peculiar—West African

drums, a Celtic harp, a keyboard, some twanging sitar-ish thing. Also, a rebec and
maracas. No one takes a partner. Everyone, musicians included, faces an altar heaped with zucchini, Indian corn, and folded-paper cranes. Sally stays clear of the roiling thick of things, but she undulates and skips most happily. Beneath her feet, springy brown needles release aromatic bursts. She sets aside all worries—her travels to come, her kids, the puzzle of her moral obligations, the planetary state of things. She shimmies into the present moment. Off to one side, a picnic table offers pulpy cider, soy-flour cookies, a flat cake heavy on the olive oil. After an hour of writhing, it all tastes good enough. Sally’s perched on a bench there, sipping, when Green Jack makes the scene. Green Jack! She knows his name because around her voices call it: “Green Jack! Green Jack! Green Jack!”
The giant comes in swinging his long pale sapling-pole, then rests it on his shoulder like a cartoon caveman’s club. The band falls silent, save for one deep drum. “Who will kill me dead?” he roars.
The spruce-crowned woman steps forward, swings one arm as if she swung a lariat, then flips her hand in his direction the way a ringmaster might. It’s Sylvia, Sally realizes—must be. Sylvia Daemonium.
Silence. That unstopping drum. Sally starts to worry. Behind her, a growl of “Ready!” sounds out. A brutish form in rag-tag wintry white, face veiled with more torn swaying strips of cloth, lumbers toward Green Jack. “I will chase, and I will kill you!”
Is this a skit, a ritual, or a test? Whichever, Sally doesn’t like this talk of killing.

It’s plain rude.
Green Jack takes off running. He never leaves the clearing. His challenger makes pursuit, neither so far behind that Green Jack laps him as they circle, nor drawing too close, not even when Green Jack starts cavorting with the crowd. Here, he swoops to steal a kiss and there he drops some trinket into a hand and over yonder he snatches someone’s offering, plunks it in his shoulder bag. His club swings wildly. People scatter. They whoop and shriek.
Now he lifts the sapling, erect but upside down. Its roots flare in the moonlight as its stripped-off branches must have done. The drum crescendos. Stops. The crowd hush-hushes. The challenger freezes a good ten feet away. “Are you prepared?” roars Green Jack. “Are you prepared for winter?” “Yes!” the solemn revelers cry.
“Are you prepared to meet harsh times with faith and courage, acknowledging the dharma of natural law?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Are you prepared to obey green wisdom and not to use the earth, to reduce consuming, to treat your father and your mother as you ought?” As he says these words, the spruce-woman clasps his hand. Dark rings surround her eyes, her chest is full and soft, her long hair streams uncombed. To Sally, she looks terrible and comforting at once.
The crowd goes over the top with cheering: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Sally wonders just how attentive the average celebrant in this aggregation is to his or her literal parental units, but she too is caught up in the energy. She too cries out “Yes!”

“But I!” cries the white raggle-taggle figure. “I will kill Green Jack!” The voice
rings with a faint familiarity. Is it Pete he sounds like? Or…? He steps forward, brandishing a sword that could be ice. There’s something tattooed on his arm. A shriek of rage and anguish breaks from the wreath-woman’s lips. Sweet Jeez. Sally’s eyes slide right and left. Are these goopy revelers around her going to let the bad guy win? Green Jack may be a tad obstreperous. Untamed. Scary, even. But he’s got to be the one to root for. Will this sterile-looking fellow be allowed to slaughter him? She feels her insides push her to step forward. She can’t. The scaffold of her rearing holds her in her place. In seconds, all is changing. The pallid figure slices Green Jack’s head off. That lumpy sphere of papier-mache rolls across the pine needles, fetches to a stop against a root. The giant crumples. The wreath-woman folds her arms across her breasts, severe and mournful. Something irreplaceable has been lost. But look! Now Jack stands tall again, strides over to seize his own great head, holds it aloft, victorious. Sally gets it, more or less: a rite of impending winter, of its temporary conquest of the green world, its ultimate defeat. What else? she thinks. Surely the wildman always rises out of death. Surely. Nonetheless, she wishes she’d stepped forward. She didn’t stop because it would spoil the play-acting. She held back for fear that gallant action might have looked ill- bred. A piss-poor reason, she can hear her daddy say. The green guardian’s challenger shuffles past her in the crowd. The ice-white veil of rags that hides his face swings sideways. Sally catches, in the lantern-light, sight of the strawberry blond soul-patch glinting on his chin. Malthus. Her tight jaw drops.

So it’s only natural that her mouth is halfway open as Green Jack circulates once
more among the crowd, the mask-head tucked beneath one arm, two real eyes peering through holes in the birdcage of his tremendous chest. Open when Green Jack walks up. Open when he drops something small and round and tasty between her lips. Later, it will occur to her that Green Jack could have fed her anything at all. LSD, that ecstasy stuff, whatever. Risky. Foolish. And yet, despite what happens shortly after, she’ll know the thing she chewed and swallowed was no more than a hazelnut. No more than a seed that lives through winter. A promise, or anyway a possibility, of life sustained. A gift that might, despite the multifarious folly around it, grow into wisdom. Given half a chance.

63.

My daddy loved hunting more than almost anything. He took me with him, twice, in the
bow-hunting season of the fall he died. I could not shoot a bow, or a rifle either—Mama put her foot down there. But I had no taste for shooting anyway.

The rest of it, I loved too. Getting up in the dark and climbing into the cab of his pick-up with a thermos of cocoa Mama had put up for us. Making feather-light footsteps through the woods. Sitting beside him on a platform in a big old tree while day rose up around us. One time, what we mostly saw was mist—wet-satin-looking swirls that the trees stepped out of as the light grew. It was enough. The other time, two deer browsed not real far from the stand. But neither turned so he could get a clean kill-shot. Daddy never loosed an arrow. His right arm shook as he drew and held, waiting for a moment that did not come. I knew it was more than muscle-ache that made him tremble.

Those were not but baby-trips, just Daddy and me for a couple hours in his friend Peck’s deer stand. I expect I would not have been there if he’d had a son. I do know he refused to take me when he went rifle-hunting with other men—Out with rowdies like Peck and them’s no place for a tender young lady like you, Miz Sweetpea. Hunters
sometimes plain forget their manners in the woods. You can come along again some
other time, when it’s just me. That got me mad enough to run through every cussword I
knew at age twelve. But I did that up in my bedroom, where nobody could hear.

I was not there when that damfool drunken Lexington lawyer shot into the brush and tore open my daddy’s carotid artery. A blessing that I did not see it, Mama said about a thousand times, and I guess I agree with that. But I never cared much for the way she said it. Almost I-told-him-so sounding, like his getting killed by someone else’s stupidity proved he’d been wrong all along about taking his daughter out into the woods.

He was not wrong. Even after he died, I knew he had been right to go. It’s where I find out who I am, punkin, he told me once. I forget that sometimes, seems like, but out
there, preparing to take the life of one of the lord’s own critters so’s you and your mama
and me has food that we know where it comes from—when I’m doing that, I remember.

Honestly, it is no wonder all that came back to me when the Harvest Moon Revels started winding down. It was partly the moonlight and the lanterns, how they put me in mind of night’s last hours, years before. Partly the way the hike and the dancing and the pieced-together ritual had brought me close to someplace apart from normal human life. And partly the sight of that man with the antlers rising from his head.

An eight-point rack—how did he come by it? I expect folks at that Spiritual Wellness Center can get real snooty about deer-hunting if you bring the subject up. I expect they show their own fine sensibilities by putting down the ignorant rednecks who kill their food themselves. But how many in that workshop ever saw the slaughterhouse their fancy sandals come from? Or smelled the misery of a hog farm up close, or visited a hellhole where de-beaked chickens ooze eggs? After we plow under all the mutant corn our cows make into ozone-busting methane, after we help the cougars come back instead of letting deer-browsed oaks grow twisted into ugly little bushes, after we stop hauling apples from New Zealand and

vegetables from Mexico—maybe then we should start ragging on respectful hunters like
my daddy. Not before. That’s what this Ignorant Redneck’s daughter thinks. But here’s what happened. Raggedy Malthus and the headless giant walked off together toward the parking lot. Antler man and the green-wreath woman finished taking down the altar. As they too left, he stretched one arm, palm held up, in my direction. No fear, I thought I heard him—or someone—say. But his face was barred by shadows so I
can not be sure if it was me he was reaching toward. I shook my head and got another cup of cider before someone took the last of the food away. Too wound up to sleep, still half-ashamed I had not helped Green Jack when I thought he needed it, I sat in the empty picnic grounds. That’s when I started recollecting Daddy in the deer stand.
The band got done with packing up. The last few car doors slammed. The revels were over, but I’d burned through my tiredness. A wide pathway led off from the clearing’s far end, along a fenced-in pond. Why not take a cool-down stroll before heading to my tent?

I did not use my flashlight. What with the moon brightening the open air beyond the chain-link fence, I did not need one. The sound of water running not far off rang sweeter than the sexy mixed-up music had. I walked toward it, stepping carefully but easy, to a footbridge across a narrow creek.

No railing. White-barked trees like iced-over moon-rays. On the bridge I stopped, caught by the glitter spilling over the little dam a few yards upstream. The pond was another reservoir, like Campbell’s Cove except a whole lot smaller. I do not know what got drowned when they built that dam. Or how many new

fish and stillwater plants and pond-loving bugs and turtles and such things moved in. I
only know I saw the gray-man there, not glowing, but reflecting moonlight the way a cloud-bank can. He reached his hand out toward me. Beyond him, a darker curve lay across the lower sky. Why, that is the slope of Monadnock, I pointed out to myself, and felt relieved. If my sense of direction still worked, I was bound to be sane. I felt near about certain of that. The gray-man wavered, coming closer, down from the spillway, along the rocky creek. But was it him? I asked myself. The same one, up here in the New England woods?

An answer came back, real clear: again i greet you.

This time he touched me with both hands. Moved around me like a fog. Once more, words I half remembered ran right through me—not like a ghost but as if all of light were condensed in him. But whatever he was, he was not just words.
The fog thickened. I felt my body lift from that small bridge, felt it being caressed the way a kindly parent would caress it. Or a nurse, a lover, some kind of priest. A lover, mostly. To this day I do not know how to say what happened. The fog—or air or water—supported me. Supported us. Kept on as we shifted closer, alone, so different, meeting here. We moved together, skin to liquid skin. Pores kissing pores. The gray-man’s touch was cool, not fiery. Never insistent, even after I started to insist. When he entered me I wanted exactly that. In that space of time, I did not know what difference meant, if he was alien and we were joined or we were one and could not be any other way. But would it mean anything at all, to choose between those two? This is impossible, I thought, right before I gave up on thinking for a while.

Maybe I hit my head up there on the mountaintop, I thought. Maybe I am in a coma.
Maybe I am cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Maybe I am not I. Maybe all this world is emptiness.
More words murmured in my head. Not words that I myself thought: yes. yes, possible. and empty. and present, too, this world. yours.

BOOK V:
PRINCIPLES OF GEO-PHYSIOLOGY

They dance with fins and wings, with

reverence into other worlds singing.

They know the water is the skin of the river.

Water as a god. Skin as a bridge,

a veil, or netting.

—Cathryn Hankla

64.

Sometimes distance is the answer, if you want to see the lay of the land. Yet sometimes
(Sally Paradiso tells herself), after you have learned earth’s shape, after you have gone to the river, known immersion, a person might feel a need to rise away.

Well, but the vaporous memory of the gray-man need not trouble her, she decides. It won’t, it won’t, it won’t.
On a lofty hill outside Amherst, Massachusetts, pure white and aspiring, the Peace Pagoda stands. Prayer flags wave from its garden’s trees. The concrete slab that used to ground the nearby temple—probably torched to drive the weirdoes out, one local chatterbox has said to Sally—lies cracked and open to the sky. The stair steps up to its No-Building hold a tiny Buddha image, piles of offering stones. This is a site of presence, not avoidance. Sally doesn’t know that, though. Shaken by what happened at Monadnock, she hustled off to a new campground. Her tent’s in a state forest in north Massachusetts now; there’s no plumbing but it’s cheap. She’s splitting the days between her literary pilgrimages and jumpy solitary reading. It’s one thing to discern what earth and water are, another to be sure of where you stand. On Sunday, hoping human community might soothe her, she drops in for morning service at Amherst’s Unitarian-Universalist Society. There’s a talk on a Buddhist scripture, the Heart Sutra. Then, during the social hour, Sally chats her way around the room. Someone mentions the hilltop pagoda; she snags directions—plus free coffee and

a chunk of fruity black molasses cake.
Japanese Buddhists in central Massachusetts? Kerouac would dig it. Off and up she goes to circle the white dome of the sanctuary, to gaze toward the boxy towers of Amherst’s largest campus, down in the scooped-out valley. She wanders an eternal knot of garden pathways under pines and chestnut oaks. Soon, a calmness fills her lungs. The question of her sanity can tend to its own knitting—or unraveling. Like pictures of Japan, she thinks, but wilder, these irregular weedy flowerbeds
that merge into asymmetries of woods beyond. Like heaven, if heaven has stone footbridges over quivering ponds. Surely heaven harbors bullfrogs fat and placid as the fine fellows who squat here.
“He creeps me out. He’s got a frog-face and he totally creeps me out.” Two young women—older than Ess by no more than five years—have strolled into the garden. The one in front whirls round, walks backwards, chopping the air with her hand, showing her friend the intensity of her creeped-out-ness. “You’re dissing frogs?” The friend’s voice carries across the ponds: “They’re dying off, all over. Weed-killer, too much ultra-violet, whatever. Big-time habitat loss. The guy comes on too strong for you, that’s one thing. But don’t diss the frogs, Denise.” Sally coughs. A bullfrog dives: ker-splash. Buxom Denise and her trot-behind friend crack up.
Sally considers heaven’s burgeoning population of these benevolent bulge-eyed gargoyles. Her stomach wrenches. Great choruses of mine-canaries must sing descant to their solid bass, these days. What’s coming next, she thinks. Who else is getting poisoned?

“Your problem, girl,” the friend announces as another bullfrog dives, “is you
don’t know where you’re going. With this guy, I mean.” Now Sally is the one creeped out: their talk hits too close to home. She leaves the garden, stalks over to where a replacement temple stands half-built. Bright ceremonial paper garlands rest like lumber on the scaffolding within. A signboard mentions the need for contributions. Sally folds a dollar bill, shoves it through the slit in the metal box. These people won’t be stopped by fire. Or hatefulness. What does it take to move on with such clarity? They lead peace-walks across the continent. She adds a folded five.
On her way back to the parking area, she spies a wooden house among the trees— two stories, with what looks like an office in the living room, and rows of kale and chard and such out in the garden patch.
Sally slips closer, trying to make out what sort of place this is. A woman in loose robes, knit watchcap pulled onto a shaved-bare head, steps out. Spots her. Tilts her face on her reedy neck.
Oops. Sally shapes a smile and waves. Her hand splays like a starfish. “Hi!”
Pale-skinned Sister Amity bobs her head, walks closer, introduces herself, loosing a little stream of half-bows, bob, bob, bob. “Welcome.” They begin to talk; she speaks with whispery exactitude, presses palms together every now and then. Sally’s never seen a countenance so full of light.
“You take volunteers here? To work on the temple, or maybe help you in the garden?” Sally gestures toward the rows of vegetables, shocked by her own bluntness. Not to mention what she’s said. Good heavens! Does she really want to stay?

Sister Amity smiles and bows. Yes, yes, they do. Excuse her, she must go into
town right now—someone’s waiting. Sally’s welcome to look round, of course. It’s wonderful that Sally’s here, but… Please excuse her. Did Sally see the pagoda? Just up the hill. She’s confident that Sally can find the way. The nun presses her palms together again. Not one bit like that Shanti Jennifer at the House of Yoga, Sally thinks. Not trying to get me to admire her, for starters. “That’s right,” the nun says with conviction, still half-whispering. “You’ll find your way.” This sounds distinctly good. Yet doubtful. Sally’s worried about her impending housing problem: there’s no cheap camping in the Boston area, where she has simply got to go. She smiles back—she can’t not smile in the light from that round face—and shyly bends her neck, then bends from the waist. Has she ever bowed so deeply to anyone before? Sally tries it again. What did the sign at the new temple say? These people think world peace will come from pure intentions, a tranquil heart.
They’re either loopy, Sally figures, or they’re dead-on right. In any case, they walk the land. From the driver’s seat of her old sedan, Sister Amity bob-bows farewell, steering with one hand, holding the other upright before her chest, sketching the gesture of grace and blessing. Come the day a certain fracas breaks out in Concord, Sally will remember Sister Amity.
Soon the rains begin. Sally continues the visits she’s been making since she tracked down the graves of Willa Cather and her companion Edith Lewis, the morning she left Monadnock. The morning after that… that moony night, that waking dream, that crazy apparition. Driving first up to Franconia and Derry, then from her new campsite

into Amherst nearly every day, Sally’s been looking in on Robert Frost and Robert
Francis, on Helen Hunt Jackson and Eugene Field, as well as just about every spot that Emily Dickinson ever set a button-shoed foot upon. Even the Mobil station on the site of the house where the poet grew up. But not her burial place. Not yet. Twice, Sally has talked her way into a dorm to sneak a shower. Three times, she’s phoned a friend of Professor Augenblick’s who teaches outside Boston, at U. Mass. Lowell. She needs to find a place to stay, close to the city. This stranger is her chief hope.
Secretly, she’s also been in search of waterways—of some sign that her meeting with the gray-man’s formless form was not unreal. Some sign of what is what. But the Peace Pagoda ponds held only stillness. In Amherst, Sally discovers no stream near the Dickinson homeplace, where she views the poet’s rich red paisley shawl, the poem-notes jotted in the margin of a recipe. No sign of the extraordinary at the Fort River or the waterfall near Pulpit Hill. No brook at Wildwood Cemetery, where Emily’s brother Austin lies beneath evergreens. Only, now, these rains. Sally keeps asking people for their favorite watery locale, claiming she’s a landscape architect, an environmental artist, a student of feng-shui. One glimmer breaks at the start of the second soggy afternoon. She’s leaving stylish Wildwood, ready at last to go to Amherst’s older graveyard, to call on the poet’s own resting place. Then something in her pulses. She jerks the Yo-truck to a stop. A pond stretches from groomed lawn of the cemetery entrance to groomed lawns of houses on the farther shore. Young trees arc round its far end; tangled deadwood breaks the surface there. A feeling rises with her breath. A hint of nearness.

She gets no more than that. But she’s unsettled by it. The next grave can wait.
Sally heads back downtown to a coffeeshop that offers Dickinson’s portrait by the dumpster, and leaflike espresso-swirls drawn in the latte foam. A little security, a little drying out: that’s what she needs. Yes, yes. Graying graduate students murmur. Laptops ping. In a bathroom painted in homage to verdant Costa Rica, she washes her face and armpits with hot water. The way she’s living has got to change, she thinks as she swaps her wet socks for her next-to-last clean pair.
Sally scans an abandoned newspaper: sabers rattle, civil liberties erode like shorelines in a nor’easter. The anniversary of 9/11 has passed; she spent that haunted day hunkered in the woods, nervous about what might happen in D.C. or New York. Her brain replayed once more the burned-in TV images of burning towers: so close, so far away. She wrote in her journal. She cried. That night she looked up, saw stars reflecting one another like mirrored lamps, like a net of polished jewels. Forgotten, the newspaper slips from her table with a rattling crash. Time, she thinks, to get a move on. The unshaven kid behind the counter recognized her when she placed her order.
Up and at ‘em: she calls Prof. Augenblick’s friend in Lowell once more. Maybe this evasive man in Kerouac’s home city has found her a house-sitting job, a fill-in sublet for a week or two, some student apartment sofa where she can sleep in commuting range of Boston, Concord, Salem, and under an actual roof. He said he’d try. The telephone rings. And rings again. No point in voice mail—Sally left a message yesterday: Hi again. Lou Augenblick’s student, just checking in. She slogs out

into the rain.
Soon Sally arrives at her favorite poet’s iron-fenced grave. CALLED BACK, the stone asserts. The rain picks up. A busload from Maryland arrives for this highlight of their tour. They grumble, make weak jokes. Two slim women in vinyl rainhats—Tokyo office ladies on a sentimental journey?—splash in from the other gate. Sally’s socks are soaked again, of course.
Quietly, someone begins to read. An awful Trumpet mashed the air— The others one by one fall silent.
Something spins from listener to listener. A second person reads a poem. Nature affects to be sedate. A third. The Mountains— grow unnoticed— Their Purple figures
rise. The spun-out something wraps itself around the dripping accidental congregation.
Those smooth-skinned Japanese travelers, the assorted Marylanders, vagrant Sally, all stand tranquil under wet umbrellas or within the caverns of their jacket-hoods. Doesn’t matter, Sally thinks. It’s only rain. In the slippery drizzle, a gray shape coalesces. Not even Sally sees.

65.

Really, were my so-called pilgrimages worth these hassles? Maybe not, I thought, the
morning I bundled up my icky-damp tent and left for Lowell. But I reckoned if I stayed on near Amherst, I’d wind up going back to Sister Amity, asking would they give shelter to a volunteer, asking how to live as she did.

That did not fit the plan on my fellowship application. The only plan I had. Besides, I all of the sudden felt I could not bear this looking into creeks and ponds one moment longer. So I headed east toward a failed farm called Fruitlands, crossing the eroded granite jelly roll and meta-sediments of north central Massachusetts, pleased I’d learned things from my geology guidebook, worried as all get-out about where I’d sleep that night. Also, on the run, to speak directly. But I did not admit that then. At Fruitlands, a clear day at last: on the horizon I saw Mount Wachusetts looking like a chunk of lapis on a necklace, more of Thoreau’s stomping grounds. I toured the red house where little Louisa May Alcott lived in her daddy’s New Eden, till it broke down. Lived on philosophy and apples, mostly, the way my professor told it. In 1843, all kinds of proto-hippies passed through this commune. Thoreau helped with fundraising but—join up? No way. Emerson visited, and clucked his tongue. Me? I will tell you, I was building up a powerful head of discouragement. I truly was. My socks? Wet and stinky. And I was wondering if the tent might mold. In the spiffy tearoom by the parking lot, a table of be-suited older ladies checked

out my faded jeans and spattered shoes and the sky blue flannel shirt Val sent for my
birthday. A ragamuffin, that’s what I’d turned into. Mama would simply die. The waitress called me “miss” about a couple hundred times. It did not seem respectful. She was maybe thirty, with dirty-blonde braids and a tattoo on each ankle, and I think she took me to be her age. All I was willing to buy for lunch was a pricey plate of pumpkin soup. Nice china, but it peeved me that it did not come with bread. I spilled my water. The waitress frowned like a lipsticked prune. “No problem, miss,” she said. This made me feel for that stumble-footed Hank Q., but I did not enjoy it, not one bit.

I tipped big and left hungry, thinking I should tuck my tail and head on home. My housing problem was a sign, in case I could not catch what the waitress and the well- dressed ladies were signaling: I was over-reaching. Forget adventure. Forget getting my degree. Wangle alimony or get a no-brain job and join the Dumped and Bitter Club. I’d seen them meeting at the juice bar at my gym.

The honest truth is, I had been fed, even though I did not seem to know that. My eyes had gazed on an actual lock of Louisa May’s auburn hair, on the rafters of her garret bedroom—chestnut-wood, I felt dead sure. My fingers had touched the dining table where Mrs. Alcott, one strong-minded lady, laid out meals for her husband’s shifting crew of mooncalves. I just had not yet noticed what all that meant.

The Yo-truck’s engine started with a growly roar. I broke into my can of emergency peanuts. Well, holy Hades, I told myself—it was only mid-September. By January, when that Con-Sociate Family commune-thing broke up, the Alcott girls were colder in their garret than I’d been in my tent. Did Louisa May worry where her next

shower was coming from? Did Sister Amity?

I would try to hang on a tad bit longer. I’d drive on east.

Next time I passed water—swamp or river, hard to tell—I stole three sideways glances, lightning-quick. Still not one sign. Just as well, I reckoned. There was something in what happened at Mount Monadnock’s foot I wanted to have again. But there was something frightening too, like I might lose my self to this phantom, this invader. Might become his instrument. It was not going crazy had me worried now. Not crazy. Not exactly that.

66.

Sally sets her mind on what Mama called good cheer. She crosses an inactive fault zone
onto a new terrane. Greater Boston’s outer ring of superhighway ushers her northeast, toward the redbrick actualities of Lowell. The Yo-truck strains. Jack’s Lowell at last, thinks Sally, pressing harder on the pedal, ready for that
mill-town on the falls of the Merrimack, wishing she could settle there a while. Wishing she at least knew where she is going to lay her head tonight. There are a couple commercial campgrounds within a tolerable driving distance—expensive and cramped and RV-ridden and bound to be short on trees. Sally aches for someplace better. For encouragement, she recalls her hobo-ing literary hero heating a can of beans in some waterless lonesome railyard. This does not entirely work. Ah, and the roads here now three-decades-going-on-four since Lowell’s own Franco-American son and mournful celebrant was laid to rest! All around her, scads of mysterious go-getter Yankees drive toward their mysterious go-getter Yankee goals. In a high-speed surge, the little red truck is edged toward, almost past, but finally onto, the Lowell Connector. Grooved roadbeds, lane-jogs, ominous walls and disappearing shoulders; archaeological patchworks of multicolored pavings, potholes numerous as asteroids, ramps that split and split again forming exits A-B-C too quickly for the choosing: this belated scion of Eisenhower’s transcontinental network takes her, swift as falling water, past Chelmsford, where the Pennacooks lived before the smallpox

and the English came. Past the sterile pathos of Lowell’s languishing Industrial Park.
Past half-glimpsed strip malls, fine old houses, and still-respectable smaller ones. Finally, she’s ejected onto what might be the route to the heart of town. Sally wheels across trolley tracks and a stone-walled canal, into a parking lot. Interesting neighborhood—is that gold dome off there a church?—but gritty. She locks up carefully. No way she can sneak a night’s sleep here in her truck. Passing through the echo-eerie canyon of an empty mill-building’s courtyard, Sally finds the Visitors Center. She chats up the two Historical Park rangers. Maybe she can handle this ironbound citified proud and tattered terra incognita. She just needs to get her bearings. Also, really, sometime soon now, needs a legal shower and solid food. But first she must go, madly must, to the Kerouac memorial in its canalside park. She walks re-cobbled downtown Lowell streets to the pink-tinged granite stelae inscribed with streams of words from novels, memoirs, poems. A skateboarder swoops among the park’s stone benches. Nuke the Mount Sophia Firetower, says the button that falls and rolls to Sally’s feet as he twirls off. The branches of the nearby willows sway. Problem is, their shadows are stretching out. Best make a last-ditch call to Prof. A’s friend, then give up and drive back through the traffic to the Kampground, pitch her sodden tent by someone’s mobile second home. She sighs. For the first time in weeks, she wishes Noah were there to ask if she’d like un poco di vino, wishes Dickie would yell from the TV room ‘M getting me a tallboy, sugar bear—you want one? Instead, Sally finds a pay phone. She dials, still hoping for good news. This time, the call goes through. This time, Sally is reminded that there’s one thing worse than getting someone’s voice mail: getting the person and then an answer you don’t want.

67.

PARADISO BROTHERS’ CONTRACTING
since 1983

new construction . remodeling
commercial . residential
Make your home or place of business a genuine paradise!

Dear Shaunna,

Please do not stop reading.

You know I am not good at talking, you told me that yourself. I think I have changed some, but, it is probably still true. I want to say a hundred things, starting with, I am sorry. But, we do not have to get into that if you do not want to.

I need your help. This is about some legal stuff Arjay cooked up when you worked here. I need to find some papers, or, at least find out what you remember.

Please let me take you out for dinner at our old place. Or we can just have coffee, if that is all you will stand for. Just so we can talk about the Arjay business.

Did your mama tell you I dropped by to get your new address? She called me “white boy” again, but I always kind of liked that, it took the pressure off somehow. Seems like she has got her head on straight about the race business, better than most folks at least, especially when she laughs. You would be surprised to know how much time I have spent studying on that subject (analyzing the situation, you would say) since last

time I saw you. I think I get it now, what you meant about how it can not be ignored, no
matter how much two people want to. Not here and now. I will call you, but I decided I ought to give you a chance to think things over first. This is why I did not just drive up and knock on your door like I have wanted to.

I don’t know how to sign this. “Yours sincerely” does not sound right after how it was between us. I am sincere, but, you made it clear five years ago that I am not yours.

Alot has happened since then. I need your help. Please.

Richard

68.

I will get to telling what-all went on the second time I went to Concord, but for now I
will just say Kerouac once wrote that Henry David Thoreau was a neighbor of mine at Walden Pond near Concord, the trees of which I can see on clear days from this present
upstairs bedroom where I’m writing. He must have had eyes sharp as a chicken hawk’s.

But geography aside, I learned a lot in Lowell. For one, the descendants there of French-Canadian, Greek, Polish, Irish immigrants have new neighbors nowadays: folks from Brazil and Cambodia and Sierra Leone. They still ask each other, “Where ya from?”, meaning, what country before you or your great-grandparents came to the U.S. And they still follow up with “Where d’ya live?”, because in Lowell, your neighborhood—Pawtucketville, Highlands, Little Canada, The Acre—tells them who you are.

Not that the neighborhood thing isn’t pretty much true in Alloway. But in Alloway, we know already what part of town a person lives in. Or else can make as guess that is about as good as knowing. If not, we would not want them to be thinking we are snoopy. We’d as soon dig up the story on our own, and roundabout works fine.

Not so Peg Beaulieu. In fifteen minutes, she knew half my family history and had given me the nuts and bolts of hers: mother born a Cassidy, father who spoke French before he started speaking English, and both of them fetched into this world within a few blocks of the mills.

“Ya know, Sally, if ya lived here from now to the day ya die, ya’d still be a blow- in. That’s what ya’d say when people ask where ya from: ‘Oh, I’m a blow-in’.” She leaned back on her side of the table, grinning big. “Nothing wrong with it, of course.”

The table stood in a wood-paneled pub in downtown Lowell. Not a scruffy bar like the Rainbow, where Kerouac used to drink, and not like his wife’s brother’s lounge, that’s a trendy trattoria now, with a dozen real artistic-looking garlic bulbs painted on the front. This pub looked like it jetted in from whatever part of Dublin the Euro-dot- commers live in—new and dripping with pre-fab ambience.

I liked it fine. For one thing, Peg was paying for my beer.

She felt that sorry for me, anyway. I was hoping she might see her way clear to helping me out a little more.

“Find what ya were looking for?” Peg asked me half an hour earlier, as I slouched toward my truck in the Visitor Center lot, resigned to Kamping out. I whirled around and recognized her as the fifty-something ranger who had warmed up considerably back when I said thanks but I really did want to buy the street map for the whole city, not just use the freebee that keeps tourists in the spruced-up part downtown.

“No, ma’am, I did not,” I said. “Looks like I’ll be snoozing among the rec-vees.” By the time we figured out that I meant I had not found a place to stay but she meant had I found the Kerouac memorial, and then I said how much I liked the feel of Lowell already, which led to me explaining why I’d come there—by that time, it seemed real natural, her asking me to join her for a beer. Long as I promised to stop treating her like a uniform, she said, and call her “Peg”, not “ma’am”.

“My partner Phebe’s going to meet me at the pub at six,” she added, quick enough

I got the messages. I could back out if I wanted to; she did not care. Just know her for
who she was, and don’t think she wanted more than a little company.

I won’t pretend I did not think of Ess right then.

“Well, good,” I said. “Then I will be acquainted with two people here. I do not think that professor I’ve been pestering has any wish to hear from me again.”

No one in the pub so much as turned a head when Peg’s cell phone tootled Hard Day’s Night. “Ya lab run long, hon?” she asked the telephone. Making wide funny
apologetic eyes in my direction, she paced toward the door. I sipped my tasty, bitter brew. What would Mama say if she saw me drinking expensive foreign beer with a Yankee lesbian in a historical-park ranger suit, and her Yankee lesbian girlfriend on the way?
Well, Mama, get over it, I would say to her. Get over it please, ma’am.
It is a shame I had not had it in me to tell her to get over a few bigger deals back when she was still alive. All her mooning over long-lost Richmond glory, for one thing, and that suffocating corset she called being able to hold your head up in this town. But the Sally she raised me to be did not sass her elders. That Sally smoothed things over, and would have made a dress from velvet curtains if she needed to look good. That Sally tried not to let on if she got riled—or if she was worried near-sick about having a dry roof above her head.
Peg strode back in, wearing her big old grin. She offered me two things: a lead on a possible (“repeat,” she said, “possible”) place to live for the next ten days, and a definite spot on the couch in her and Phebe’s apartment for one night. “Repeat,” she did not have to say, “just one.”

69.

It’s only smart, to help out strangers. Life that does not support life pushes the universe
toward absolute zero’s indifferent steady cold.
That is to say, a lifeform takes from the commons of the stars the fuel it needs as a
stay against the slide of all things physical down toward stasis. It also drops its refuse—
star-born matter now brought closer to the homogeneous dullness of maximum entropy.
What’s been laid waste slips lower still. Consider the deforestation of north
China, dynasties ago. If you go there, you see fields with single crops, and lines of
stringy poplars, where mystics once could gather magic mushrooms, a riot of medicinal
herbs. You breathe dust. Irrigation mechanisms spread. The water table sinks.
Or consider the swapping out—in Pakistan, Afghanistan, great swaths of Africa—
of woodland for crumbling deserts, thanks to hungry families’ need for kindling and a
place to graze their goats. Or the monochromatic quasi-pampas left by coal companies’
quasi-restoration of West Virginia mountaintops stripped away. Trees can’t root well in
that compacted rubble; few species can, and all because one species chooses devastation
over the abundance that was there.
Or, of course, the clearing of jungles in Brazil and Indonesia and the Philippines
and so on. The hard-pan soils left afterward can’t support new trees. Water that once
dripped into the pretty cups of epiphytes, water that swelled fruits consumed by birds and
bats and primates: it rushes now directly to the ocean, too swift for much evaporation.

This means, in all these places, less rain falls. Hence, less can grow.
The rain that does come slams down hard. The old layering of leaf and branch
and petal is not there to break its force. Gulches form. Land vanishes, muddying the
streams.
The creatures who drank that trickling rain, who flew or burrowed in the strata of
the understory or down among the roots (and all who lived on them) go too. Imagine the
loss, the galaxy of occupants in the skin-folds and the bellies of one endangered race of
agile golden monkeys.
But here’s the thing. It may not be too late. The hideously crowded twenty-first
century won’t end pleasantly; that’s already been decided. War, famine, pestilence, and
major ugliness will ride their bony nags, their farting Hummers, through the global
village. Yet just possibly, we—we curious, bald-ish, flat-faced, long-range-planning-
capable hominids—we can begin the slow swing round. We can help strangers, and so,
ourselves. We can start to heal more than we harm.

70.

“But Peg-osaur! It’s ya day off,” Phebe rocks her head from side to side. The mass of her dark curls sways; a faded t-shirt emblazoned H.O.P.E. pulls tight on her full breasts. “Come with us. Ya got ya civvies on, hon—who’ll know? Yo, those bozos prolly won’t even do the thing, and we’ll just have a cool day messing round in Concord. Ya gotta be overdue for a hit of ritzy picturesque.”

Sally and Peg Beaulieu and Phebe Rigopoulos are breakfasting at—where else?— the Paradise Diner, which backs up to the green-glass flow of Lowell’s Eastern Canal, shadow-shrouded by the old Boott Cotton Mill. The mill is a museum now, haunted by the silence of its looms. But the clattering diner (red vinyl booths, tile floor, enormous aromatic agglomeration of home-fries on the grill) bursts with the promise of fleshly satisfaction any time it’s open. Get there early, or wait in line. Sally’s learned that much in the past eight days. She’s been living down the street, right across from the Kerouac memorial park, in the studio apartment of a Dutch grad student summoned home by someone’s death. Phebe’s lead paid off: a room and kitchenette and shower of her own—just feed the cat and keep a windowful of plants alive.
This Saturday morning at the Paradise Diner, kids freed from yellow-brick Lowell High lay plans, some in huge jeans, some whose jeans are Britney-Christina tight. A big man in a white billcap piles the savory breakfast sandwiches high. Sally blinks, amazed:

she’s really here. The gray man’s really off her mind. Most of the time.
Instead, there’s this: Sally’s coming to know a little of Jack’s city. The store he did his first book-signing in. The shy couple from India who run Kennedy’s Butter and Eggs just down the block. An apartment building with a yellow bow on every balcony, near the church he served as altar boy. A housing project on Moody Street where Spanish replaces North American French. She sleeps in a nineteenth-century boardinghouse; once, mill girls huddled there, two and three to a bed. She checks her e-mail in the gorgeous library where he impressed himself by skipping school to read. She’s popped into the precinct station in a tenement once the Kerouac family’s home, pretending to be lost so she could dream her way upstairs to Jacky looking out his window at Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost. Somewhere along the way, she picked up on what Peg calls Lowell’s pride. (“Better blue collar than elite, ya know? Better give to ya community, be a cop, a firefighter, teacher, priest. Better college here than out at the snazzy campus in Amherst where they charge so much—that’s how people see it.”) The canal-laced mill-town says more to Sally than her daytrips to trudge literary trails through Cambridge, Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, in the city Poe called “Frogpondium”. In some way she can’t quite name—the towering mill buildings and the people do look different—Lowell puts her in mind of Alloway, built and then half-busted by the
fickle railroad, as this place was by textile barons. At the same time, she’s sure there’s nowhere truly like this dingy industrial Venice, this artifact contrived from falling water channeled, utilized. The recognition that such artifice must have a natural price? That she’s been keeping well submerged.

The disturbing, stirring gray-man, too. Or more precisely, her thinking’s been
allowed to tiptoe away from him. He wants her for something and she can’t want that. Instead, Sally fills in places on her mental map. She takes a canal boat ride guided by a ranger who works with Peg. She gawks at the ponderous wonder of the locks, feels the Merrimack River pull the boat toward Pawtucket Dam. Later, she stares at the sharp ledges of the falls below. Indefatigable, she thinks, which of course is not quite true.
Charting another life’s topography, she finds Jack’s parochial grade school on the far side of the river. She visits his grave, although she leaves there neither bottle nor cigarette butt, nor poem nor ball-point pen. Others have done that. Now, she’s met Peg and her partner for breakfast. They’ve heard about her day in Salem. They have promised advice on Concord, which she’s mostly saved for this last weekend before she heads off to the far end of the state. But Phebe’s cooked up a plan. “So, Sally,” she says. “Ya gonna go back to Concord again tomorrow, right?” She answers her own question with an emphatic nod. Her dark eyes slide toward Peg. “So today we can all rumble over in Proud Mary—that okay, Peg? Ya know if I drive Radclyffe we might not make it.”
Peg shrugs. Phebe motors on. “Yo, ya gotta love the shortcut we’re going to show you, Sally. It goes right by the water works for Concord. Peg and I can check out that Hawthorne-Emerson place with ya, the whatchamacallit, the Old Manse, high time we locals saw inside it, and that’ll put us right there at North Bridge if there’s any—” she looks over her shoulder, but they’re in the end booth and her back’s against the wall— “any action. Which I highly doubt. Then…”

Peg’s arms fold tight across her chest. She’s not eating. Phebe pauses to chomp
down on her egg-and-cheese-and-bacon-and-potato sandwich. This doesn’t stop her talking. “Then, ya gonna like this Peg-o, I’ll show ya both how to get round a bunch of houses to the right-of-way to Egg Rock. Seeing’s how Sally’s into rivers.” She swigs her coffee, sets the mug down like a gavel. “The rock where the Assabet and the Sudbury flow together to form the Concord, ’kay? Really, ‘s more important for a Thoreau freak to see that than one more dead guy’s house.” Hard to say no to Phebe. She’s almost Sally’s age, and finishing college herself, in Environmental Science. This is one reason the couple’s taken her under their wings: that first evening at the pub, Sally got them started talking green, as Phebe puts it, and things clicked. Phebe’s big on cleaning up the Merrimack. In fact, the three marched out the pub door that night chanting, Free the salmon, shad, and alewives! Which suited Sally fine, once she learned an alewife’s not a drunken woman but a small migrating fish. Today Phebe’s activism clearly itches to kick loose. Trouble is, she admits, she’s of two minds about the mysterious event that might take place at Concord’s major patriot-magnet, the North Bridge. She can’t say if she’s with them, or against. Regardless, Sally can see that it’s not in Phebe to miss a preservationist media- grab. Especially not right where some colonial militia man fired a shot into a column of His Majesty’s redcoats, and the round world heard. Peg nods, once. All right: she’s willing. Sally? She’s feeling sociable. And curious. What harm if she tags along? Oh indeed. What harm?

71.

I will say this. I flat out know my mama would not approve of what I did in Concord.
Even though my mind was fixed on going there again next day for the Sunday service at UU. That’s what I’d done the week before, in a picture-perfect meeting house, sitting among the shades of Alcotts and Emersons and Thoreaus.

Breakfast over, the day moved on, calm as it could get with Phebe towing Peg and me behind. After the drive from Lowell—past villages turned to fancy suburbs, scraps of wetlands, produce stands—we went straight to Egg Rock. I’d already stumped round Walden Pond and Concord’s big old cemetery, zeroing in on Authors’ Ridge. Believe me, by this point I could rate a literary boneyard, and that Sleepy Hollow is the best, all curvy walks and tangled rhododendrons and scrumptious intimations of mortality. The walk to Egg Rock gets a full 10, too. Except you can swap the mortality part for reminders that sometimes dying is not all that big a deal, seems like: young woods grown back as if undefeated, riverbanks that did not care one bit if they were dry land or swamp. We got ourselves a speck off course, though. Finally, Phebe hailed a canoe, shouted for directions. Right, I thought. Do not panic like I did going up Monadnock. Trust the world.
Backtracking, we spotted the path out to a point of land where all the water had to work its way around a mound of rock stubborn as Henry himself. Scrambling up, we broke through into sunlight.

Saturday boaters lazed on stretches near as quiet as a lake. “Hoo-eee!” Phebe
shouted. “The confluence!” Heads turned. Peg sighed, then gave a real good owl hoot. Here goes, I thought, and loosed a big old rebel yell. A young dad out with his two daughters got real nervous looking. He began to row upstream. Me, I was looking for some twist of air, a ripple where the rivers joined—looking for, and looking out for, something I did not choose to put a name on. Not Henry, whatever my new friends thought. Nothing hit me though, or only the rushing feeling that comes anywhere two streams meet. Walking back to Peg’s blue PT Cruiser, Phebe got off on a tear. When my boy Jack was born, she said, Lowell was dumping twelve million gallons of sewage into the Merrimack each day. “How’d you like to float down the Concord into that mess, toots?” she asked me as we skirted somebody’s big old yard. A man in plaid Bermudas looked our way, leaf-blower roaring. Phebe waved, all jaunty and hello-there.
He glared like we were lowering his property value by walking on the public access path. Phebe kept on yakking. I fixed my eyes on a plaque set near his chrysanthemums, one of those garden-catalog decorations, like it was the most important thing on god’s green earth. The face of a wild-eyed man, it was, leaves growing right out of his mouth.
The brazzz of the blower tangled with its exhaust inside my skull. My forehead tightened, maybe the beginning of a headache, maybe letdown from Egg Rock. I nodded to show Phebe I was listening. In case it mattered. “Of course the mills dumped dyes and all kinds of crap,” she was saying. “And don’t get me started on the

road salt that still washes in there, or the pesticides. And mercury, for chrissakes. ‘D I
tell ya they catch shad down at Lawrence, haul them up past Pawtucket Dam, turn them loose so’s they can swim on upstream to spawn? Some wildlife, huh? What would Saint Henry think of that?”
“Ya told her, sweetie.” Peg patted her partner’s rounded shoulder, tender and teasing both. “Don’t let it eat ya up. So what’s the deal with Mill Brook, anyways? Ya going to show her that?”
That question was what kept us from making it into the Old Manse. Too bad, I would soon be thinking, that it didn’t keep us from getting to the bridge at all. We parked on Main Street and started reading historical markers on the block they call the Milldam. I wanted to find the small stone that shows where Thoreau spent a night in jail for following his conscience, not the law. But the war monuments and flagpoles stood so much bigger, there in the center of town. Right about then my headache broke into full bloom. Besides, we were all knocked silent by the black POW-MIA flag flying next to the stars and stripes, right near the names of Concord men killed in World War II, Korea, Vietnam. One in the Dominican Republic, too, when I was not but a little girl. Who next? I asked myself.
Phebe made a crack about “the petroleum wars.” I did not want to hear it. Last time I saw Burt and Dreama’s daughter, she was a cute little thing in a flowered bathing suit, cannonball-ing into the pool. Now she was in Afghanistan, wearing camouflage fatigues, and there was talk about how Osama could be in Iraq. At least Peg and Phebe did not head over to the older memorials at the heart of

Monument Square. I did not suggest it, either. No need to bring up a certain other war
while I was in Union territory. Coffee, I was thinking, about to call for a break when Phebe yodeled us over to the little marker beside the driveway into a parking lot. “Right,” Peg said as we three looked down at it like people reading the headstone of a lonely grave. “Civil disobedience. Think his night in jail really helped free the slaves? It didn’t stop the, what was it, the Mexican War.” Her hand shot up and she kept taking. “Hold on, Pheeb. I take it back. Sure, Thoreau was cool. Anyways, I’ll help ya riverrats trace the brook.” That is when it came to me: she was stalling, hoping we’d miss the action at North Bridge. Thing was, I really did want to know about Mill Brook. Even after my years on the fringe of the construction business, I could not quite believe it, that the storefronts of Concord’s busiest block stood where there used to be a millpond, and overflow running toward the river. It was hard as imagining how things had looked way back when Squaw Sachem’s tribe had the place to themselves. But that’s what Phebe and I got into— figuring the original shape of the land. Funny thing is, I never thought of the gray-man that whole time. We walked past the jail site, down behind the row of shops, looking for where the creek broke out from its tunnel. Phebe had read up on Concord history: back in sixteen- thirty-something the milldam was built where the forest opened onto soggy meadows. “Yeah, yeah,” said Peg. “Wonder what Squaw Sachem’s real name was. Wonder how she felt bout the way the English ripped her off.” Really, coffee, I said to myself. Or anything to change the subject. But the one
thing I could think of—and it would be plain bragging—was how Jamestown got

founded years before anyone from England had the bad luck to wind up freezing in the
north, when they might have made a home down Virginia way instead. Manners aside, I was not about to bring that up. I’d seen a waver in Peg’s eyes when she said “slaves”, like, me being a southerner, she had to be real careful not to give offense. Like that awfulness was my history, not ours. Easy, Sally Ellen, I thought. She means to be nice. Maybe no one ever told her
there might have been a couple other reasons for the war between the states. Maybe no had ever pointed out that the economy up North… I could feel the information pushing, ready to bust out of my mouth. We found the outflow of Mill Brook—a trench opening from under a clapboard building to run alongside parking lots into a cattail marsh, then off past big backyards. I kept my lips pressed tight together. Turning back, we started to cross Main Street, headed for the upstream part.
It knocked me out, how most drivers in Massachusetts stop dead the minute you set foot on pavement. But there is still chance enough of bloody death to keep you on your toes. Enough to make you forget caffeine deprivation and wars over wars and all manner of unpleasantness. Wading through the rush of cars saved me from busting up a newborn friendship with a few words on the subject of who writes the history books. I brushed past someone’s giant high-gloss gas-sucker, Old Glory hanging rag-tag from the antenna. I gave the driver a wave as jaunty as one of Phebe’s. Now, I do not need that hoity-toity look, I thought as loudly as I could, you no-account oil-aholic
hypocrite. He did not wave back. And mister, that gold trim’s butt-ugly.
“Yo, over here,” called Phebe.

The scrimmage with the traffic did not stop me from considering if my tale of
Johnny Reb Stands Up To The Blue-Bellies To Defend Our Home was not just as half- baked as the it-was-all-about-slavery explanation that gets me so steamed. Working our way behind First Parish meeting house, we found Mill Brook in its stone walled channel. It was most all of it on both sides a sorry sorry business, I told myself. Think of the
Peace Pagoda, girl, and shut your mouth.
The water ran brown and clear and cool. We moved down along it, past big green dumpsters and blue recycle bins. Soon we stood a chain-link fence away from where the creek plunged beneath the building that hid it from the street. We all stared, me wondering why I’d gotten so fired up over tracing Mill Brook in the first place. A few days later, re-reading Walden, I hit the part where Thoreau asks, If a man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where, think you, would the
“Mill-dam” go to? So maybe I was on the right track after all. But this did not occur to
me just then.
“Ta-dum!” said Phebe, and Peg said, “Gee whiz, Pheeb, I feel like Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea all rolled into one. Whoopee-do. Now can we go home?” “Ya know, Peg,” Phebe stared at her partner, hands on her round hips. “Thoreau and his family did help slaves, same as Lidian Emerson and then her hubby. Hid people making a break for Canada. Plus, what he wrote bout his night in jail did make a difference. Just FYI. So ya don’t make a fool of yaself, somebody asks ya at work.” Every couple has its moments. I wandered a few steps away, picked up a little rock and plunked it in the middle of the current. Peg said something, real quiet. I plunked another rock, tried to think about my essay for Prof. Augenblick. The

underground railroad—plunk. Some white southerners helped with that one, too.
Sacajawea trying—plunk—to play the cards her father and her so-called husband dealt her. Squaw Sachem handling folks who were godawful sure that land is something you can buy and sell. Handful of gravel: plunkety, plunk, plunk. So which should I call the all-American moment? When Henry Thoreau was eleven, and Concord’s money men replaced the dam—with its grist mill, gobbling bark mill, stinking tannery—putting up a wide new solid-looking street where they could build a Greek-temple bank? Or just now, when Phebe and Peg and I stopped on the footbridge behind First Parish to heal our itchy souls in nature’s clear brown flow? I rubbed my forehead, hard. Was it maybe the melting-pot afternoon Peg’s Irish mother changed her name to Beaulieu, for better or for worse? Or when I crossed Main Street, a standing-on-my-rights pedestrian prancing past Volvos and VW’s and that Lexus SUV? How about the moment of me being all brain-warped by what we did not talk about, the red and black and brown folks who’ve paid the price for Concord’s—sure, and Alloway’s—pleasant lawns?
Phebe’s cackle cracked my mood. “’Kay, hon—that was harsh. Let’s drop it. Time to hit the bridge. Yo, Sally!” We headed toward Proud Mary, Peg silent, Phebe running on about Minute Men and the tavern where in 1775 a British major refreshed himself with brandy while his troops scoured the village for the insolent colonials’ arms. But before we’d finished the short drive to North Bridge, another skirmish broke out, up front in Peg’s car. I pushed deep into the back seat, coiled tight as a pop-up joke snake in a peanut can.

72.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

hankq@gritweb.net
Bcc:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
no more, jack-o

okay, spongebob, if you’re really a reporter, i advise you to check with yr paper’s law- droids & find out what “harassment” means. even if i know where my mom is, i wouldn’t tell you.
& my father does not own that land you’re so interested in. i asked him. but that is off the record, so you had best not print it. if you ever call my brother’s apartment again, we’re suing. only environmental hazard i see in this so-called crucial & sensitive story is yr crappy third-tier newspaper defiling the corpses of trees day after day. the earth is getting gouged & flayed & choked with poison garbage—why don’t you write about that? meanwhile, hassle someone else.
yrs with total sincerity, especially re: the lawsuit, sara esperanza paradiso

73.

Not far from greater Boston, up on Mount Sophia, a fire-watch tower has marked the
summit for over thirty years. Once it harbored solitary lookouts; now it speaks of human interaction with the landscape in times gone by. Also, it’s an interesting destination for a hiker. For fun-loving snowmobilers, for zippy ATVs.

That’s how some people see it. To others, the thing’s a useless eyesore. Or a drain on the maintenance budget, a possible source of liability suits. Or a rotting turd of anthropocentric arrogance best cleared off the mountain chop-chop, as happened at Mount Everett. Out there in western Massachusetts, after years of legal maneuverings, a Sikorsky S-58 coptered in to haul a similar structure out in sawed-off chunks.

As for the tower on Sophia? Petitions. Hearings. Journalists. Save-the- Firetower websites. Preservationists versus bring-back-the-wilderness activists. Environmental groups allied with government offices. High schoolers hoping to install a weather station on the rusting framework. College students calling it Korporate Amerikan litter, a quasi-beercan tossed by prison-guards of the logging industry’s deathcamps. A former wildlands-firefighter in Montana who wants to buy it for his collection, and is willing to do the transport. The hubbub’s been considerable.

The forest on Mount Sophia, like most forests, is now essentially a tree-zoo. But it is a pretty one, and whether the tower helps or hurts that prettiness—does that not lie squarely in the beholder’s eye? Nothing’s pristine any more. The choice is, in which

direction shall the mountain-scape be managed?

That’s what sets Peg and Phoebe off as the PT Cruiser nears North Bridge. In the back seat, Sally catches phrases like politicking screw-ups and state vandalism of historic artifacts and especially not after 9/11. She wishes the issues clearer, the answer obvious.
The way the U.S. breakaway from Great Britain must have been, she tells herself, refusing to brood further on the secessions declared less than a century after that one.

Proud Mary glides into a parking space. Phebe springs out. Sally follows, brisk. Peg’s long strides soon bring her up behind them. Sally glances at the Old Manse as they walk toward the stone obelisk on the riverbank, memorial to a revolution’s start. One more nice big post-colonial colonial-style house. She pushes her thumb into the middle of her forehead, sighs.

The bridge beyond the monument’s a replica. Peg made sure she knows that. But Sally still admires the scene—the wooden arch across the laid-back Concord River, the trees and slough and fields, more happy boaters going with the flow. She’s eager to see the statue of the Minute Man just across the bridge, alert, no doubt, as his Confederate great-grandson outside the Alloway County courthouse. But the crowd clumped up on this side, between obelisk and bridge, obstructs her view.

The backs of the crowd, to be precise. People cluster on the far bank too. Also a couple TV cameras. On the bridge’s crest, three figures stand. One beats a drum. One plays a fife. One of them holds an old-time U.S. flag.

“Oh ho!” cries Phebe, picking up speed. Pacing beside her, Peg mutters “Sheesh.” An uncanny vertigo bathes Sally, as if she were back among the branches of the France Street sycamore, or staring into the

depths of Campbell’s Cove. She feels a spellbound urge to elbow through the crowd,
walk right to the river and then...do what? Jump in? Naturally, she suppresses it. She tugs her burgundy-and-white striped t-shirt smooth, checks the knot of her navy blue sweatshirt’s sleeves around her waist. On the far shore, two men in uniform—Historical Park rangers, dressed as Peg does when she’s working—bustle down toward the bridge. But Sally can’t see what’s going on. She and Peg and Phebe reach the gaggle of people on their side. “By god, two of ‘em have crowbars!” A tall man standing square in front of Phebe has appointed himself color-commentator. “By god, they’re ripping up the planks!”
Phebe emits a snort of triumph. She pulls Peg and Sally ten yards back, where they can talk and not be overheard.
“Brill! Yo, Peg-o—right or wrong, these people know how to make a point.” What Phebe finally, finally, reveals is this: the three on the bridge, like the two chains of protesters linked elbow to elbow and blocking either end, are from the Mount Sophia Firetower Preservation Coalition. They knew a demonstration up on the mountain would not get much coverage. So they’ve come to a higher-profile place, to signify that removing the tower is like tearing a national landmark down. “They’re hooking into the whole 1775 thing,” Phebe chortles. “The Redcoats supposedly tore planks off the old North Bridge, Sally—to slow up the Minute Men, or piss them off, or both.”

A splash, and then another, reveals that here in the twenty-first century, planks are flying into the river like coins into a fountain. “Actually—” Peg holds up one hand.

“Yeah, yeah. Legend, whatever. But yo, it’s a brilliant way to say the
government’s like the redcoats and they’re the true-blue Americans.” Another splash. “True blue Americans make me nervous.” That’s Peg. Sally’s conflict-avoidance headache comes slamming back, full force. “Say, now,” she remarks in Mama’s sprightliest voice. “Did y’all know Jack Kerouac spent a summer alone in a fire-watch tower, out in the Cascades?” A roar breaks from the crowd. Peg stretches tall. Sally jumps onto a low stone wall. Phebe hauls herself up behind. Across the river, four big men in American Legion caps have broken through the human barrier. They’re charging the threesome in the middle of the bridge. The girl with the flag scoots to safety. But it doesn’t look good for the other two—a skinny guy of maybe thirty, a grizzle-bearded man well past Sally’s age. Two veterans grab the protestors’ crowbars and fling them in the river: fucking goddam tower can go fuck itself, they’ll sure-as-fuck save North Bridge. The drum sails out and down.
The crowds stand motionless, entranced. Most have never heard about the fire- tower. Most could not say where Mount Sophia is. They’re locked into sightseeing mode. Besides, doesn’t any event bizarre as this just have to emanate from television’s tricksy realm? Some, observing the camera crews, have decided it’s all a set-up for Candid-Camera/Totally-Hidden-Video dupes. Yet a lot of them agree that ripping up the bridge is not a good idea. Sally’s none too keen on the destruction part herself. But four against two? Four muscular ex-military men further advantaged by beer-belly weight, versus a fellow so

thin he might as well be tattooed VEGAN, and an old man with a limp?
It bursts on her that this issue is a clear one. She remembers how it felt, the day she barged into the president’s office at Caledonia to rescue Ess. She remembers, too, when she did nothing to save Green Jack. Perhaps she thinks of some of Concord’s bolder residents, or of fifteen-year-olds on the battlefield down in New Market, dying to protect their homes.
Her headache vanishes.
In a flash of red-white-blue, Sally Paradiso’s off her perch and wriggling through the crowd. She ducks under a couple of arms in the human chain, which in the excitement has slacked off, twisting round to see what’s happening on the bridge. What would Sister Amity do? Sally does not know. Should have spent more time there, she tells herself. Need to find a place like that.
At the crest of the arch, three planks are missing. Sally jumps the gap. She thinks she hears Peg’s voice yell, “Sally!” But in the rising ruckus she can’t be sure. “Now, you stop that this minute, sir!” Sally cries out to the nearest vet. She inserts herself between him and the older man. She stretches tall as possible, sets her arms akimbo on her hips.
The veteran means the little spitfire lady no harm. His eyes tell Sally that. Mostly it’s sheer amazement that explodes like a mortar shell across his jowly face. But he loves the idea of that bridge, and he does not love (has for decades now most piercingly not-loved) all these hippie-protestor types, taking them as he does to be a phenomenon entirely other than the Minute Men. He slips his meaty hands under Sally’s armpits, meaning to plop her out of harm’s

way—and back into her proper place, which is off the field of combat, dammit. Just then,
one of his good buddies, dodging a head-butt from the skinny guy, lurches slam-bang into him.
Two seconds later, Sally is falling through that gap in the planks, down toward the late September waters of the Concord River, wondering if she’ll hit a rock. In the distance, she hears a siren wailing. It comes to her that if she breaks her neck, she may never have sex again. If she dies, Ess will have only Val and Dickie to look after her. That’s it, she thinks. Mama was right. I have got no call to try to rectify this world’s foolishness. From now on, I’m sticking to the straight and narrow. Supposing I survive.

74.

The more distant river is ever the more etherial, Thoreau wrote, and I agree with this. He
also said We have names for the rivers of hell but none for the rivers of heaven. I expect there is no need to point out that the Concord River, which was neither distant nor ethereal when I slapped into it that day at the tag end of September, has a name. No, I am being unfair—surely that river has nothing to do with Hades. Just a speck on the chilly side, is all. I landed in a deep spot and right away snagged one of the bridge’s trestles with my arm. I hugged it and I sputtered. I flipped my wet hair out of my eyes. Before anyone could take a notion to come rescue me, I waved to show that I was fine. Smiled like I’d just finished the best baton routine of my entire two years of twirling lessons.

Not all that many people noticed. Most could not see what happened, and those who could were understandably distracted by the vet who’d grabbed—and dropped—me. Poor thing. His one leg followed me through the gap in the bridge, but the rest of him fell forward with what must have been considerable force. His American Legion cap went off downstream, solid as a garbage scow. He wound up with a compound fracture of his thighbone, and a truly untidy loss of blood. Luckily, the skinny protestor ran a Boy Scout troop. He snatched off the bandana tied round his forehead and pressed a spot on the veteran’s leg—they may be a tad stupid when it comes to gay folks, some of those Boy Scout leaders, but they do know their first

aid. He held down the veteran’s blood flow till the rescue squad arrived. That is one
thing I learned from the newspaper story, when I read it. I am sorry to tell you it also informed me the old man I had aimed to save was an Akido teacher. I guess he’d been in no kind of real danger at any point.
At the moment, however, my main concern was making my way to dry land and then skedaddling. Someone was bound to get in trouble over this unpleasantness. No reason for that someone to be me.
The planks above me started rumbling—the human chain must have broken, letting the crowd move in to take a gander at the blood. One vet’s head poked down through the gap in the bridge, all bushy eyebrows and serious squint. I did my smile and pointed toward the riverbank. “God bless you, sir,” I said. “But I believe I’m doing fine.”
Time to get a move on. In seconds, I was moving through the lazy current like I had a squad of redcoats—Yankee redcoats, if such a thing was possible—on my tail.

Peg and Phebe ran to meet me, slipping round behind the tag end of the crowd. When I hit the bank, they each reached down to grab one of my arms. With perfect unspoken teamwork, they helped me up. A couple great big high-school-looking fellows galloped over, eager as Labrador retrievers. This I did not want. My motives had been the purest but I still felt I’d best fade away before someone in a uniform started asking me to explain myself. Peg had the same view of the situation. “Stand back please, gentlemen,” she barked in a take-charge Park Ranger voice. “We’ve got her.”

“Yo!” Phebe added. “Ya guys see where those planks floated off to? Government

property, yo!” New objective: they rumbled off.

Soon, dripping and oozing from every pore, as Thoreau also wrote (only he was describing nature herself the day he started his floating road-trip on the Concord and the Merrimack), I was back inside the PT Cruiser, a picnic blanket wrapped around me. “Hang on,” murmured Peg. We zoomed out of that parking lot faster than you can say One if by land and two if by sea.

I do not know what put it in Peg’s mind to head for Walden Pond, except we did need to go someplace and collect ourselves. Someplace I could dry off. Someplace not right in town, but crowded enough we’d blend in if the law came looking. “Yo, Sally, duck!” said Phebe as we passed the police station on Walden Street. I settled for a slouch.
We walked down to the beach end of the pond, found a sunny place to sit. Kids made sand piles. Young folks took each other’s pictures by the famous water. A couple men stood hip-deep in waders, fishing. Walden has to be stocked these days, Peg said— the pickerel got fished out a hundred years ago. She had brought along three cans of Coke from a stash in her trunk, and we spent a good while laughing and telling each other the story of what-all had just transpired.

By that time we were what you’d call real friends. Friends enough I felt not but the tiniest bit awkward when Peg cleared her throat and said, “Sally?”

Phebe too guessed what was coming. “Yo, Peg-osaur…” she said. But Peg persisted, asking would I mind if the two of them went off for a little stroll. They had some things to talk about. Meaning the quarreling they’d been doing, as any fool could see.

I will tell you what I told them, that I was pleased as punch to see a couple dealing, instead of letting a bad moment fester. Like I used to do with Dickie, I did not say. So I left them the south shore and set off to the site of Thoreau’s cabin on the north.

Hardly any leaves had turned yet, even though October was knocking at the door. Long Indian summer this year, Peg had said when we were looking for Mill Brook, and Phebe’d said global incineration was more like the name for it. Me, I thought of the record-high temperatures and the drought back home. Back home. Incineration. The tire dump blazed up in my mind, sorrowful and
ugly. Oh Dickie. Oh Arjay. Oh Mister B. Calloway. Oh oh oh Hank Q. A jogger passed me, wearing headphones, singing along to Joni Mitchell, evidently. Looking across the water, I could see the carefully re-wooded shore. Hard to believe all that environmental stuff is happening, the trees looked so cool and fine, even a few healthy-looking hemlocks in the shady parts.

This pond, I thought, this pond is where Henry took Louisa May and her sisters riding in his rowboat, playing older brother after her family moved back to Concord. Good old head-strong votes-for-women Louisa May, who led a troop of irate ladies to the dedication of the North Bridge monument after no gentlemen showed up to escort them. Neither she nor Henry cared over-much for what is proper. But they did not get themselves tossed into the Concord River in front of a couple hundred of their fellow citizens. I had made myself look a hoyden and a smarty-pants and an out-and-out brainless wonder: I could hear my mama clear as twenty bells. I could hear her inquiring in a fluty-molasses voice, what exactly did I think I was doing with this new life of mine?

As I closed in on the cabin site, the traffic on Route 126 sounded steady in my ears, same as how inside a beach house you hear the surf. I set myself on a stump that I swear might have been the stub of a chestnut tree, and watched while visitors—some of them speaking languages that were not English—came and went between the little pillars where the door of the cabin used to be. Solitude felt real appealing to me just then, but I could see that Walden Pond is not the place to get it nowadays. One youngish couple stuck around a while, hotly discussing a fellow named Leonard. The girl said he was the like deepest spiritual teacher she’d ever met. Other people pretty much kept quiet, read the signboards, maybe left a rock on the pile of rocks that had been building there for years. Most stared at the inscription carved in the stone that marked the fireplace.
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth. That is one dreamy-eyed
description of turning trees to smoke. But are we really what some of us like to think, a nation of dreamers, here in the country Jack built: yearning Jack and bristly Henry and abolitionist Lidian and the hot-headed minute men and straight-on Louisa May? Or are we state-sponsored vandals—careless arrogant bullies like Arjay Paradiso—filling up the planet’s biggest tire dump?
I jumped to my feet. Enough on my mind without all that. Anyhow, back at the Walden Pond parking area they’ve got composting toilets in the rest rooms, and they re- use the water from the sinks for the flowers planted round-about. Surely a few of the half-million folks who pass through every year take notice, maybe begin to change their ways.
Walking down to the shore, I fluffed my hair to dry it, pulling Phebe’s sweater

tight around my middle. Thoreau’s Cove.
No wind blowing. The water’s surface kind of hung there, taking its color from the sky and trees. The name put me in mind of the reservoir in Alloway—except, down home “cove” means a deep side-valley in a curving mountain, not a bay. A cove once filled with blooming laurel, that’s what got flooded when the county put up that dam where the Campbells used to live.
But Walden’s a real pond, not a blocked-up creek. Its deep basin used to be a chunk of glacier ice. No streams flowing in, no river out—spring-fed. And I was seeing no sign of that iron-colored, no-colored woman from Campbell’s Cove with the antlers rooted in her brain.
Not her or anyone. My Chamber of Commerce guide-map had told me how Emerson said the good river god of the Concord took Henry’s form in order to clue him, Ralph Waldo, in on a few things about its shadowy self. He was being cute, though, tossing out a fancy metaphor. Me, I had not only just now nearly landed myself in serious trouble, or a wheelchair maybe, but I was worried about an actual river god that wanted me for something. Or a water spirit. A cool-skinned ghost. A chickadee scooted past me, into a clump of alders. God or spirit, river or creek or brook or reservoir—the problem was not in the words. On the road or off the road, I definitely needed to stop not-thinking, once again. Needed to deal with my bone-deep certainty that this holy-man water-thing and I had truly done what I might as well say was making love.
Truly.
So right away, I started bird watching. I spotted a kingfisher up in a hickory tree,

keeping a sharp eye on the water. It put me in mind of one I saw where Tolliver Creek
runs along the edge of the Caledonia campus. Now, when was that, I wondered. Last spring. I saw it catch a fish. Saw it break out of the water like something being born. Like me, could be, when Peg and Phebe pulled me from the clear brown Concord. But the bird was no metaphor—it was a kingfisher. It was surely no water spirit, either. Just what Daddy called one of the lord’s own critters, trying to get along in a world that allows a little less room for it every day. And me, this creature known to some as Sally Ellen Paradiso? What was it I had been reborn out of the river to do?

BOOK VI:
LIFE IN THE WOODS

& four thousand years of using writing equals the life of a bristlecone pine—

A spoken language works
for about five centuries,
lifespan of a douglas fir

—Gary Snyder

75.

River-deities, primordial water-women, tree-messengers may summon. If so, the
vocation cannot well be refused.
In other words, if someone’s called to work that links our all-thumbs tribe with others—with non-human entities informing woodlot, farm, and lingering wildland—then that work must be done. Whether frightening, grand, or small. Whether the shape it takes is isolated ecstasy, or the clearing-away of pestilential foulness, or transmission of what nourishes like springs from the groundwater welling up. A shaman, any messenger for the immanent extra-ordinary, just can’t say no, thanks. That’s how many cultures have viewed certain individuals’ intense relation to the vitality our own culture-clump calls Nature. Yet beliefs about this “Nature”, about how Homo sapiens sapiens connects with the breathing body of terrestrial life—those change
with time and place.

Right now, for example, Sally Paradiso wants nothing to do with rivers and numenous powers. But she’s chewing on the notion of human stewardship over earth’s fair garden. Benevolent, on the face of it. Yet “stewardship” implies not only a mighty separation (there the roses, cacti, soybeans, banyans, kelp; their overseers up here), but competence. A competence the evidence does not support. It hit Sally hard, on her farewell night in the Irish pub, when Phebe Rigopoulos pointed that one out. Next day, she said good-bye to Lowell and Concord, to fervent

Phebe, stable Peg—and to the embarrassing tomfoolery of poking her nose in other
people’s business. That just gets you tossed into cold water, doesn’t it? Intending to be from now on a prudent spectator of life, Sally packed the Yo- truck. Wheeling herself across the state, west across the Berkshires’ start-of-autumn crest, she stopped to visit William Cullen Bryant’s country homestead. She admired the poet’s aging grand allee of maples, a scrap of old-growth woods he saved, the rock-ribs of the hills he celebrated, what he called complaining brooks. Now, two days after her immersion in the grassy Concord River, she builds a campfire in a state forest at October Mountain that’s gearing up to earn once more its rust-gold-crimson name. She is done with charging into action. Sally adds another log. She’s been wrestling with Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” once the front-runner for Nineteenth-Century U.S. Poetry’s Greatest Hit. Plumping up her reading-journal for Prof. Augenblick is another attempt to keep her mind off things. Yet she can’t see how the valleys and the woods around her could be but the solemn decorations for the great tomb of man.
“Everything all right, young lady?” Ah. It’s the campground ranger, come around with his enormous dog—Bear, she thinks his name is, either Bear or Ben—a mixed-breed with one ruined foot. Interesting old uncle: a storyteller who knows a lot about the woods, which makes his occasional young ladys worth enduring. He takes Sally seriously despite her size and her long curly hair.

“Yes, sir.” No. Maybe it’s his accent that appeals, his courtly ways. From the Mississippi delta, so he’s said. Maybe she’s just lonely. Funny: same state as Hank Q. She ruffles the dog’s thick fur.

“You find that computer place in town? The cyber-dingus. Coffee shop.”

“Yes, thank you, Mr. McCaslin. It is exactly what I was looking for.” She grins. “My little home-away-from-tent.”

“My first name’s not ‘Mister.’ Call me Mac.” He winks. “Not that that’s my first name, either.”
They swap a few more sentences. He hitches up his pants. “You’ll have to excuse me now,” he says. “You know how it is with us geezers.” His head nods in the direction of the campground bathroom. “Got to listen, when nature calls.” “Now that is surely true,” she says, and grins again. Back to her book. The poet meant well, our English major muses. Seems a mite self-involved, though, to assume the forest’s there as trimming for our left-behinds. A little dumb, besides, to think a system built on more fine-tuned counterbalancings than you can shake a sequoia at will handle any old thing we choose to dump. Believe as William Cullen Byrant did, and “conservation” sounds…nice, maybe, but optional when the chips are down. As if the tomb could go undecorated in a pinch.

Not that I have got a better answer. Sally pokes the fire. Not that I could stop the
trashing. In the fireplace, a stick breaks into coals.

At any rate, she’s happy camping out again, for now. She still hopes that getting to know the homeground of men and women who left books worth reading will give her what she needs. Whatever that might be. What Sister Amity has, she thinks. Or any bird that fishes in clean waters.

76.

Sandwich! my mind kept crying. Come on now, honey, bring my sandwich. I slouched
in my chair in a terrace café overlooking Laurel Lake, waiting for what could be both early supper and my make-up lunch.
Please. I might faint dead away. Bring my sandwich on out here now.

That terrace—a mighty pretty one, all white stone and Italian-looking railings— stands behind the mansion where, back about a hundred years ago, Edith Wharton wrote the novel that made me switch my major from Business Arts and Sciences to English. It is where someone named Daphne steered me toward a little expedition I will be describing soon, which was a blessing and a trial.

Thing is, I almost did not visit The Mount, Wharton’s fancy haven in the Berkshires. Lord, how the Paradiso brothers would have cut up if they’d gotten the contract to build this cream-puff! I knew that first time I passed its two-story gatehouse, glancing at it on my way from October Mountain to the coffee shop in Lenox where I swapped e-mails with my kids.
I will admit it. The ticket price—two or three times any other writer’s house— was one reason I did not rush in to see the place. It plain stuck in my craw. Yes, I recollected what my Modern Novel teacher said: a daring woman for her time and social class, oppressed by society’s restrictions blah-dee-blah, born into a cage of money, blah, blah, blah. Still, the gatehouse tipped me off. There had to be a whole long shabby string

of invisible no-plumbing cabins somewhere behind that snazzy property.
Instead, I visited a park named for W.E.B. DuBois. I made the drive to Hartford, paid calls on Wallace Stevens and Samuel Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Right near my campground, I discovered a window in Melville’s study zeroed in on Massachusetts’ tallest peak, looking like—what else?—a big old whale. I hiked to the cliffs of another mountain, Monument, where he met Hawthorne at a picnic. I looked for the “Red Shanty” on the far side of Lenox. Nathaniel served champagne to Herman there.
My money and my energy were running low. I had not been sleeping too awfully well: most every night since I splashed into the Concord, I’d climbed a slagheap in my sleep, a giant pile of Pennsylvania mine-trash. Maybe, I started thinking, my road-trip had run its course. All I had to do was quit. No. There was no way on this green earth I would give up, go home this soon. Then, one day when the morning coolness did not leave the air, it came to me that it was near about time to move on to…somewhere else. Time to finish up in Lenox. After a stop in the coffee shop, I made the quick drive to The Mount. And loved it.
Now, Emily Dickinson’s house has fine-looking fireplaces and nice big flower- beds. But every scrap of Edith Wharton’s place was made to be purely beautiful. True, it got to be as run-down as a forty year old single-wide up a hollow, before the society people and their designers began to fix it up. Why, of course the ticket cost a lot. So I wound up in that café at The Mount, listening to my stomach gurgle, planning how I’d fit Wharton into my big essay, reckoning it a good thing I had come.

Today in Alloway, it was warm still and real muggy—I’d checked the weather
on-line in Lenox. But here in Massachusetts, the first leaves were going goldy-yellow and sugar-red. According to the guide who talked me through the house, that lake below the terrace spent centuries as a deep spot in a miles-long pool of meltwater come from the Hudson Valley ice-sheet. Now, millennia had passed. And still no sandwich, my stomach yelled up to my brain.
To distract myself, I pretended like I saw Edith and her run-around lover and her pretty-near-crazy husband on a stroll between the lines of linden trees that cut across the back lawn. I purely admired the way the walkway’s neatness played off the swampy shrubby belt around the lake beyond. I wondered about that big old lawn, though. It did not seem to know the meaning of the word “dandelion”. The café’s one server hurried up, sweet-faced, hair in cornrows, soft braids hanging down her back. “Crisis in the kitchen,” she said. “No lie. Sorry.” She slid my plate down easily. Daphne, her nametag claimed. She looked like she could be a friend of Ess’s—right age, right arty-looking type. Her eyes were large and green, her skin right on the border between brown and gold. “All cool in there now. Get you anything else?” I allowed as how I’d like permission to move in to The Mount but, other than that, thanks, no. Daphne made a laughing sound. “I mean,” I said, “it is truly gorgeous. But.” “But?” Daphne glanced round at her other tables. I figured I ought to let her go, but I had not had much conversation with anyone the past few days. Every time I called Ess and Val, I got the machine, and neither had sent e-mail for a while. Even that pest Hank Q had not written one of his rambling please-call-me’s in about a week.

Sometimes I just purely need to pass the time of day. “But—the lawns?” I said.
“They use a lot of weed-killer?”
Daphne’s braids bobbed. “You bet,” she told me. “A shit-load.” She was with me now.
“Life in the twenty-first century, I guess,” I said. I did not want to give her grief over the place she worked at. “At least it is pretty.” I tilted my head toward my favorite part, the sunken secret-garden square—all vines and stone archways, a fountain in the center.
“No,” said Daphne. “It’s death. You know those toxins wash right into the lake.” The veils of cheerful-waitress fell away from her. “That’s a basic example of why I gave notice. As of two days from now, I’m out of here.” Her braids swung as she looked across the terrace. “Um, excuse me. Those people want their check.” The sweetness of her features softened them a little, but her words were not what you could call politely passing the time of day. On the other hand, she spoke truth. And she was giving up her job for what she believed in. I stared gape-mouthed after her for one full minute. Then I bit into my basil/goat-cheese/roasted-veggie wrap. I wondered where those tasty peppers had been grown.

77.

A Romantic writer? Yes. True, Edith Wharton did decree a neo-neoclassic cleanness in
houses and the grounds around them, but that was her reaction to Victoriana’s dustable fuss. At The Mount, however, her own rooms stood closest to the naturalistic alpine rock garden, rooms with views of undomesticated Laurel Lake beyond the lawns. The Palladian staircase, the French-styled and Italianate garden squares—those were her post- colonial reverie of European glory. Yet wild North America framed them. She’d left Manhattan and the burdensome trivialities of town to find balm in an illimitable nature.

Those were the days. And today? After that sandwich arrived on the sunny terrace, Wharton’s gardens, the fountains’ plashing: these sent Sally to a place of peace. Our heroine is human and not in immediate mortal peril. So she needs art. Really, there’s nothing wrong with lavish tastefulness, except its planetary price. Now Sally Paradiso—literary pilgrim, fossil fuel consumer, SupaPharma shopper, ambivalent ecstatica, part-owner still with Dickie and the bank of a spacious lower- upper-mid-range home—reaches the familiar endpoint of a familiar inner dialog. (People want lawns, they use poison or else pay someone peanuts to dig the weeds out. Giving
myself miseries will not fix the situation.) Daphne returns. Says “I didn’t mean to—”
then accepts what Sally can only express by gesture, erasing a blackboard made of air. “Good,” says Daphne. “So here’s your check, friend. I can take it any time. Also, just from me, here’s something you might like. I’ve got to work tomorrow, but if you’re free…”

H.O.P.E.-hike for Mother Gaia says the slip of paper Daphne hands her. Up
Alander Mountain to Bash Bish Falls. Then beneath the meeting time and place: Shoes
optional.
Hmm. A chance to postpone the future for another day. Back at the campground, Mac McCaslin tells her the waterfall’s a must-see. So, next morning, yawning, Sally parks just down the valley, in Great Barrington. Right away, she spots a thin man wearing a basket on his head. It’s large, loose-woven and inverted, resting on his shoulders. A bamboo flute emerges from it like a clarinet; he plays slow notes, sometimes breathy, sometimes razor-edged. Walking over, Sally sees how long his toes are. She’s relieved that the two women beside him, holding a board burned with the letters H-O-P-E, wear shoes. Despite her childhood years of Sunday School, the words Mount Sinai never cross her mind.

The basket-headed shakuhachi player (“My name is Clark, but you can call me Kokop’ele”) puts on hiking boots as more H.O.P.E.-hikers gather. Still, it’s all a little weird. Sally starts trying to think up a polite excuse for leaving. Or should she just jump back in the Yo-truck, drive away quick, be rude?

The half-dozen other hikers mill around the parking lot, waiting for stragglers, discussing who’ll carpool with whom. Sally hovers. No one pays her much attention, except one girl who makes the usual sort of comment on her shock of hair. Sally wishes Daphne too were here: anything for a touch of familiarity. She does like the odd music. But the shakuhachi player’s announcement that it’s time for om-ing strikes her as somewhat odder. For one thing, Sally’s never heard the word used as a verb.

Well, gal, get into it, she thinks. Wanted to meet some people, right? Wanted more oms, too. So you are meeting om-ers, Sally Ellen. Take the hike. The seven strangers welcome her into their circle, arms round shoulders, hip to hip. Sally fills her lungs and lets the air slide out. They all exhale: AAA-OOO- MMMmmm. They om and om again. The syllables crest and fall like waves, like
mountains. At some point undecreed, the chanting ends. “We dedicate our walking effort to Mother Gaia.” Kokop’ele/Clark speaks loudly, his plain-and-fancy statement ringing toward the rear doors of a row of shops. No one in downtown Great Barrington on this pellucid October morn so much as turns a head.
A dark green Subaru pulls into the parking lot. “Cool beans!” someone cries. “She did come.”
Sally glances at the driver. Very tall and very blonde. Skin the color of skim milk.
Unlikely indeed, but not impossible in western Massachusetts: Sally knows this latecomer.

Down
her
back,
she
feels
a
thrill
of
ice.

78.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
no trespassing?

now, do not worry, maah—the val-man bailed me out. i gotta admit, all that junie-owen wack-out brought us closer. the man’s my bro. talks to me about his feelings & everything. he even listens. you should hear us.

okay. about the bail. i didn’t want to worry you. but these planetary mindfulness people i’ve been hanging with, we did an action yesterday at the gulch caverns nuke- waste disposal site. an exorcism of the poison fire, we called it—cool way to get the rad christians & the eco-buddhists both on board, no?

so after boo-coo prayers & sutra-chants & bible readings & music-making & the burning of the desert spirit-boats (it was beauteous & prayerful, maah—being there made me feel like, blessed is what one of the sisters, nuns I mean not sistahs, called it), we did this walking meditation. totally nonviolent. word. walked right up to where the national guardsmen waited, looking all fake-tough & jittery. (i mean, i eyeballed one who couldn’t be as old as i am. is that not super-freaky?) everyone called it the line in the sand, for some reason.

then the ones of us who had taken the vow stepped over & the county cops

stepped up, one for each elbow, & marched us politely but so like come along now missy,
over to this big army-colored bus they had waiting.

waiting! like it was their turn to do their ritual. the old sergeant-types were totally i’vebeenthruthisbefore. but possibly some of them will start to wonder… we sat around the jail forever, talking & singing, but i didn’t get to meet a crew of picturesque junkie/prostitute/pickpockets the way i’d been hoping. then it was my turn to go before the magistrate (good thing i’ve had practice, huh, maah? yo, my caledonia education’s paying off) & eventually val turned up with the cash-ola, a little pissed cause i didn’t tell him what was coming down, only left a note on the kitchen table, but how dumb does he think his baby sister is?

but i love the val-man & i love this planet & i’m trying to love the scared boy- soldiers (also the cute girl one who drove the army bus) & i most definitely love you.

tell me you aren’t really doing yr e-mail from a cybercaf called moby’s! too too much. scuse my politix, & i know you liked sending from that library where jk hung out, but i still say he was a sexist irresponsible booze-monkey. so this new place is a move up.

i’m fine, maah, really. here’s the thing: doing this made me happier than i’ve felt in the whole past year. in years.

peace
out.

ess

79.

The bamboo flute rang in that half-empty parking lot as I checked out my fellow hikers—
eight now, with the late arrival. I surely was ready for a little human input. I’d not had time to pick up e-mail that morning, and quick chats with waitresses and campground rangers were simply not enough. But these folks? It was a fairly peculiar-looking crew. Not the outfits from the Day-After- Woodstock Rummage Sale mixed in with lumberjack gear and dance-class tights. Not the girl with the three ponytails or the one with tiny dyed-pink spikes. Maybe it was the fragile-but-psyched-up look most of them wore around their eyes that gave me second thoughts.
One guy announced we’d walk in silence, soon as we hit the trail. I did love that notion: on Monument Mountain I don’t believe I went ten minutes without hearing yells and chatter and general carrying on. So I started the day off willing to cut the whole “Help Our Planet Evolve” group considerable slack. Especially since the flute player removed his head-basket before taking the wheel of the van I was riding in. To tell the truth, I was relieved when the latecomer wound up in the other vehicle, a truly banged-up Prius. Shanti Jennifer Eckdahl had halfway-bowed when she first saw me, her two palms pressed together like that day at the House of Yoga when she taught the Spiritual Re-Alignment class. Her long thin shiny blonde-blonde hair fell forward. “Ah,” she said. “I knew we had business. Sally, is it? Namaste.”

You could have knocked me over with a rolled-up yoga mat. I did not know if I
should shriek amazing!, or ask if she’d been back to Alloway lately and how was my teacher Anna and had she heard anything about an illegal tire dump. I did not give a hoot about her cheesy India-Wisconsin accent. I did not give a hoot that she was a far cry from being Sister Amity. Talking with someone who had even just passed through Alloway County would have felt as good as ordering tea in a Massachusetts restaurant and getting it iced and sweet.
But somehow Shanti Jennifer did not give off a let’s-chat aura. Fact is, the funny feeling I got from her in Alloway came back. She wanted something from me, seemed like. I pressed my palms together. Also my lips. I namaste’d. Three other H.O.P.E.-fuls rode with me in Flute-man’s van. As we rumbled past the farms and country homes into the forest, one of the sign-holding women, Alessandra, told me and Newnie about H.O.P.E. Turns out, it was not any old hiking club. Newnie was the other first-timer. Twin hair-knots up on top of her head bobbed as she nodded, saying “seriously” after every notion Alessandra laid out for us. She looked to be about sixteen—but turned out, she was three years older. I expect her grandparents came from Italy, same as Dickie’s daddy’s people. She favored the super- schoolgirls in those Japanese cartoons more than anyone I have ever seen in the flesh. “I found H.O.P.E. at Turtle Island,” Alessandra told us, absolutely solemn. I recalled the flat bowl I had when I was not but a tiny girl, where a baby red-ear turtle lived in exile beneath a plastic palm tree, like it was stranded on some tropical asteroid. But no. All-Nations Turtle Island Settlement in Oregon—that is the mother group, the homeplace you might say, where the whole H.O.P.E.-thing started. People there share

everything, same as the Alcotts and the others did at Fruitlands.
Alessandra first came east to help start a H.O.P.E. branch tribe, the Winooski Valley Gathering, in Vermont. There’s lots more smaller groups, she told us. “I know we’ll have a hundred thousand H.O.P.E.-ing soon,” she said. “I know it deep down, so I know it’s true, you know?”
“Dude,” said Newnie, nodding. Her vocabulary was bigger than I’d thought. This particular crew, the Housatonic-Hoosic-Berkshires-Tramontane H.O.P.E. Council, all lived, Alessandra said, wherever. They got together three or four times a month. Seemed to me they had a surprising number of members who could spend a weekday on a hike.
“We do what we can,” said Alessandra. That surely turned out to be true. The goal of Help Our Planet Evolve is this: to move human consciousness to a higher level by plugging into what they call The Gaia-Mind. The H.O.P.E. people have a view of history that took Alessandra a good five miles of bumpy back roads to run through.
First, she said, came clans in caves, throwing rocks, getting messages from nature gods. (This part made me feel somewhat agitated.) Then little kingdoms organized by bullies—“but like, all spiritual in a hungry way, a bunch of big religions taking off in like the same century—Hebrew prophets, the Gita, the Tao Te Ching.” Then empires turned into nation-states and along came individualism and technology and atheism—“or really just soul-confusion from the overload, Kokop’ele says,” at which Flute-man in the front seat murmured Mmmm. And now the Pan-net—“pan-global network, and that’s more than fiber optics, let me tell you”—is starting to get hooked up at last, but it’s threatened

with breakdown by epidemics and starvation and resource-wars. Or else it’s soon to be
fulfilled by the birth of a new way of living, tribal and global both at once. “That’s the basic deal,” said Alessandra, “only…”
The other sign-holder, Trix the triple-ponytail girl, jumped in. “Really, there’s like a spiral thing happening too? A yin-yang kind of order-chaos flow?” Her hand flipped back and forth, palm up, palm down, palm up. “But always a rising in the collective consciousness. With major freak-outs at transition times.” “First the Black Death,” said Alessandra. “Then the Renaissance. Like that.” Newnie’s hair-knots jumped back and forth. “Duuude,” she said to Trix, and then to Alessandra, “Seriously.”
Do tell, my mama would have said. It did not seem to me like Alessandra and Trix quite had the answer to the new plagues and the battles over water, oil, and farmland, or the godawful famines people say are coming at us. Unless somehow we were truly working on that today, with our dedicated-to-Gaia hike. The van lurched through a pothole on the forest road. Newnie giggled. Sheer craziness? I asked myself.
But I had no call to be judging: me, I brought two more humans onto this planet, and never thought how much trash they’d crank out, especially living how we do in this country—not till the night Hank Quesenberry blathered about his vasectomy. The population nightmare is not a subject I’d been real eager to bring up with Nonnie Bee. My friends before her thought I was a born-again earth-mama just because I kept a compost heap and had not used disposable diapers much. With Peg and Phebe, I felt too shy to talk about it, although I guess now I should not have. All Noah ever said was, kids

are major karma, but what can you do?
I’d filed it all under Think About Tomorrow. And felt plain grateful, I have to say, that I had my sweet babies before I took notice of what is going on. At that point I did not know what a mess of stuff I was about to learn from my hike companions. Or how. Flute-man pulled into a little parking area beneath a rocky knob so shady-damp the tree trunks showed lichens more than bark. The four from the Prius greeted us with bows: Shanti Jennifer and pudgy Coreen in her red sweatpants; Lubie, whose tongue jewelry clicked against his teeth and a sturdy bossy fellow named Rich or Mitch.
“The falls are still there,” said Rich-or-Mitch. “I just boogied down that trail to check.” First person all morning to say something even a tad bit joke-y. I nearly gave him a high five. Trix and Alessandra looked blank as bo-tox. “Dude, seriously?” Newnie said.
This parking area would be our endpoint—after going up Alander Mountain, we’d walk back here along a ridge, then make a round-trip on the short side-trail Rich-or-Mitch had mentioned, to the catch-pool of Bash Bish Falls. After that, someone would use the Prius to get the van from where we’d soon be leaving it, at Alander’s foot. Flute-man played a few airy notes. Our purpose, he said firmly, was to pour the energy from our mindful hiking into the waterfall. To purify what flowed. This afternoon, we’d try to pray it clean of whatever’d been dumped upstream, he said— bacteria or trash or polluted human attitudes. “If nothing else,” he added, “this might cleanse us.”
He surely did make the day sound easier than it turned out to be, I will tell you

that much right up front.
We all squeezed in the van for the ride to the Alander Mountain trailhead. I glanced at my watch. Gone.
Oh, right—Flute-man had asked us in Great Barrington to put them in the glove compartment. Did not need them in the woods, he said. Called it relinquishment, which is when I guessed his college major.
I stared at flickering trees, still mostly green and so much lusher than the dried-up woods back home. Main thing for us and the next couple generations, I told myself, will be getting through what Hank Q called the population bottleneck without too much awfulness. In which I include the awfulness, if it is even possible, of huddling in Fort America while the poor world goes through the kind of End Time my papaw used to talk about when he’d sipped too much from his flask. We parked at the trailhead and circled up for another round of om-ing. Then Trix and Shanti Jennifer passed out floppy hoods. I took the cloth for greasy burlap, till Alessandra whispered they were hand-loomed hemp, waterproofed with beeswax. She didn’t have to say the H.O.P.E.-fuls think wearing them’s important. The way Trix carried the box to Shanti Jennifer, the way the tall blonde with the red dot on her forehead unfolded them real slow, the way that Flute-man bowed before he settled one on his head and shoulders—it was plain as day.

All right, these folks were awfully earnest. At least they were giving it a shot. I recalled the slagheap I’d been dreaming about since Concord. Somebody painted big white letters on it once, likely some mining company’s brag. But I could not read them, when I drove past it—they’d washed into gibberish, like an old headstone or eroded

hieroglyphic-things.
My dreams had got me thinking sometimes about my great-grandkids. Maybe they’d be way too poor and way too hungry, living on our giant slagheap, to learn how to read. Maybe all our poetry and history and science would be faded cockeyed hieroglyphs to them. Maybe they would hate our guts. When I thought that way, I felt like giving up. Hopelessness comes cheap, I reckon. Same as sneering. Or else they cost too much. I tried to fix my mind on the aims of this hike. Let the H.O.P.E.-fuls run on all they wanted to about some planetary consciousness. I would not sneer at these holy fools.
Still, I asked myself as I pulled my waxy hood up over my head, was it reasonable to trust myself to them, without a map or walking stick or compass, in these not-exactly- markless woods?

80.

To Sally Paradiso, last but two in a straggling line of hikers, the hooded shoulder-capes
before her look like the cowls of monks. As well they might: there’s real devotion—and a penitential streak—in this small band. Also, an ingenuous trust that Gaia, Mother of Buddhas, takes no offence at the presumption she needs assistance, not just a break.

Oh, but the day: the day is beautiful! Old meadow being pioneered by evergreens. Woods not unaxed, but open. Although her cowl blocks eye-corner vision, it does focus Sally on the objects before her, just as they are. On the group’s slow step- step-step: the pace Kokop’ele sets is slower even than foreign Bruno’s on Monadnock, little more than half her usual bounce. “Move mindfully as we enter silence,” Shanti Jennifer tells the group. Except for Coreen’s answering cough, silently they go. That cough and one other thing: the chime. Trix walks last, carrying a tiny mallet and a metal bar. When she strikes it, the ringing pulls Sally out from her mental cat’s cradle of North American romantics, toxic landfills, nasty Arjay, loyalty and Dickie, Noah, boldness, Hank Q, babies, Ess, Val, credits needed for graduation, cultural collapse, her next laundromat. They reach a creek. The water’s up. It covers the stepping stones, shin-deep. Half the H.O.P.E.-hikers stand on the far bank. But Coreen’s been going extra slowly; Sally and Lubie and Trix, coming up behind her, don’t see how they did it. Alessandra circles her arm: C’mon. Beside her, Newnie beams encouragement.

Duuudes. Rich-or-Mitch presses palms together. Shanti nods a Norwegian sage’s nod.
Kokop’ele’s bamboo flute gestures toward a tree-trunk lying bank to bank upstream, a good eight feet above the currents.
“Here goes nothing.” Lubie sticks his tongue out for an instant. Studs flash in a shaft of sunlight. “I see myself succeeding. I’m walking true. I am across.” At first, in fact, he isn’t. But then, staring at the far bank, stepping small quick certain steps, he is. “Solid,” says Trix, shaking her three long ponytails for emphasis. “Just, like, vision it, ladies. Who’s next?” Coreen shakes her head. “You first, um, Sally?” Sally pictures herself raring back, then crossing with a whoop and holler. But this is not a yee-HAAAW kind of group. Then those long-ago classes at Miss Sudie’s School of Gymnastics and Baton pay off. She sits astride the fallen tree-trunk, leans her weight on her outstretched arms and scoots herself across, ker-plop, ker-plop. Cheers break out from Alessandra, Newnie, Rich-or-Mitch. Sally pops to her feet. She V’s her arms toward the infinity beyond our finite atmosphere. Coreen follows, scooting Sally-style but struggling with the limp weight of her flesh. Her sweatpants catch on branches’ stubs. Her chin lifts; she won’t quit. When Trix too has walked across, lips moving soundlessly, the whole group gathers in a sunny patch on the old forest road. This time, Sally oms whole-heartedly, free of thought. “After the breath, the senses,” Flute-man says. “We’ve been using our ears to link us to Gaia’s music. We’ve attended to her atmosphere, breathing against our skin. Now we close our eyes, receive her diversiform perfumes.”

The smells comfort Sally—sun-warmed duff and sugary rot of fallen wood,
slivers of resin, mushrooms’ musk, a chilling whiff of boot-crushed wintergreen, and under it all, damp leaves’ exhausted tea. Trix strikes the chime. Kokop’ele leads off again, Shanti Jennifer close behind.
Sally wants to step out ahead of Coreen. But that would hurt her feelings. So when Lubie falls in after Alessandra, who’s on the heels of Newnie and Rich-or-Mitch, Sally urges Coreen forward with a smile. It’s the smile of faith and expectation that helped send her son to med school, her daughter into ways more venturesome than Sally’s own. Lubie’s not the only one who creates realities. Mama Gaia’s perfumes stay with them. As do rustlings, steady step-sounds, the clatter of a woodpecker, a bluejay’s harsh Achtung! Sally keeps her gaze soft-focussed a dozen feet ahead, trying not to peer or seek or name. When she comes too close to Coreen’s heels, Sally sets her feet to a slower pace. Coreen’s determined, but her body’s big. Her heart has to work harder than the others do. The trail turns sharp uphill, along a side-branch, crosses over. After teetering on the stepping stones to the far bank, she stops dead. Springtime runoffs and too many bootsoles have worn away the soil, exposing stones and roots like rough diverging staircases. Which way to go? She plants her stick and, panting, will not move. Trix and Sally join her. It comes to Sally that her age is probably the sum of Trix’s and Coreen’s. But Trix is the one with the walkie-talkie; she calls Alessandra. After some static-crackling conversation, it’s determined they are where they ought to be. They simply need to find the trail.

Trix says, “Don’t worry, ladies. We’ll be fine.” Coreen’s feet stay firm, like the
hooves of the fabled cow once led by pranksters up into the bell-tower at Caledonia. The cow the janitor had to shoot when she refused to descend the stairs. Trix just stares: what to do, once optimistic declaration proves to be not enough? Something in Sally snaps. “Hang on,” she murmurs and—farewell, good-girl congeniality—bounds past Coreen. Scrambling up the bank, she pushes back her cowl, turns to look the way they’ve come. She sights two blazes that mark the path for downhill hikers, then spins one-eighty. Sure enough: the next blaze steps out of the jumble, lined up with the other two. Our pasts reveal so much about our futures, if we can climb out of the muddy mazy watercourse, get a proper view. Sally waves the others up. They press on. Resting just short of Alander’s summit, Trix leads the threesome in a faltering om. Coreen breaks silence. Sally shushes her with offhanded gentleness. “If anyone should apologize, Coreen,” she whispers, “it is me. Pushing through like that.” Oh sure, say Coreen’s eyes.
It’s only then that truth’s trail-blazes align for Sally: Coreen and half the other H.O.P.E.-fuls haven’t hiked much. They grew up in urban zones, or where one suburb bleeds into the next, the next. If they got into the woods as kids, it was on half-mile boardwalked nature trails. Papaw—she thinks, then hears the beatific tone of Trix’s chime. She readjusts her cowl.
On the windy summit, the others bow in greeting. Blueberry bushes and low clumps of sheep laurel surround stone outcrops, grassy patches. Spruce dwarfed to shrub-size prove they’re still below the actual treeline, in the scrub zone.

For Sally, it’s not scrub but Kingdom Come. The attentiveness, the hiking-
rhythm, the slow rinse of her lungs, the elevation and the airy light: these give her what Noah promised. Contact, Thoreau called it, with what spirit is bound to—to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth!
It gives her this: long valley views to east and west. The verdure, and the windchill-blocking comfort of the stunted trees. The link-line of Mount Race, Mount Everett, Mount Bushnell, where the Appalachian Trail runs north toward the hulking shade of Greylock, great Ahab-like rebuffer of the merely transcendental. A place not dimensionless but absolutely here.
No need for a pagoda, even. Everybody grins. Lunch is a distraction. Their silence blows away in the crackle of paper bags, the lid-snaps of re-used feta cheese containers. Only Shanti holds her tongue, maintaining an aloofness. Her chopsticks click from time to time, precise. There’s talk of sushi, of the Atlantic salmon population, of Lubie’s boss at the health food store, of a local reiki healer who gives ayurvedic consultations. A large hawk rides an updraft above the western valley, distinct against cobalt clouds building beyond the state line, in New York. Sally gestures; Shanti Jennifer and Kokop’ele nod. Trix’s sesame squares are passed around. Lubie brought dried seaweed for the gang. Rich-or-Mitch has olives, Alessandra, extra figs. Newnie offers mini-carrots. Sally waves her bag of sunflower seeds. Coreen declines everything, eats her little cup of yogurt a half-spoon at a time.
Lovely though it is, Sally gets irritated. Kokop’ele wanders off, hunches on a hump of stone, shoes off, looking south. But the others trample blindly on the shorter

softer scrub, trading goodies, getting water bottles, finding better shelter from the wind
without one whit of courtesy to what grows beneath their buttocks and their feet. You’d think the mountaintop was carpeted with heavy-duty astro-turf. A louder conversation flares. Someone has firebombed a plant-genetics lab out in the Midwest. “Gotta wake people up,” says Lubie, tongue-metal clicking. “The mono- cropping profiteers, they’re the terrorists.” But pressed by Trix, he admits he’s glad nobody died. “I heard they took precautions to make sure no was around,” he mutters. Coreen shakes her head.
Sally leans away from the disputation, slips her jacket on—it’s the one she bought for Dickie: big on her but waterproof and breathable. Digging in the pocket, she snags a spruce cone. Remarkable how the woody petals (no, scales the campground ranger called them) how the cone’s scales spiral round its core, fitting together seamlessly, and never a scale directly over the one below. That way, the seeds each protects get a fair share of the pollen, water, light, and air. First-rate engineering, Mac McCaslin said. The argument dissipates on the brisk wind. Kokop’ele dons his basket, plays a melancholic tune, insubstantial as a molecule. The hawk has disappeared. Kokop’ele sits to replace his socks and boots.
Sally’s first shiver catches her unawares. Standing on a bump of rock, she swings her arms, imagines breaking into jumping jacks. She pulls out her wool cap. “Maaan,” says Coreen. “Should of brought one. But the weather said sixties today.” She stuffs her hands in her sweatpants’ pockets. Her head rears back. Ka-choo. “Meteorologists,” Lubie snorts. “More media-candy to make us think we know what Gaia’s all about. Electronic weed for the masses from the corporate machine.”

Newnie’s eyes brighten at the sound of “weed”. She slides a glance at
Alessandra, then frowns severely.
“Science, Lubie,” Rich-or-Mitch begins, “can be a partner in the ree-volution. Same as technology, even. But if you demonize them—” Kokop’ele hoots one long diaphanous note. Shanti Jennifer releases the cow-face posture she’s been holding. Sally pulls out her bandana, ties it round her neck for insulation. One by one, the group steps north, following the long ridge to Bash Bish Mountain. They spread out yet more widely on the trail now, as Kokop’ele has suggested. Trix strikes the silvery chime: awaken! The hawk returns, a second soaring behind it, a third and fourth. Three more join them, late to migrate but right on course, wheeling on the warm updraft. Sally wants to shout, draw everyone’s attention to this gathering. But Coreen’s head down, indifferent to everything save getting home. Trix paces well to the rear, true to her assignment: sweep. The others have gone too far ahead. The hawks float in their circles, coasting, moving higher, lifted by the rising air. It comes to Sally that the spiral of each flightpath is an echo to the pattern of a spruce cone’s scales. Of a sunflower’s leaves, a conch-shell’s whorl, of certain galaxies. And never mind the spirals’ hollow core. Gliding in a calm place somewhere between noiseless dread and updraft rapture, warmer even though the temperature keeps dropping, Sally walks.

81.

I just plain did not figure what that afternoon would bring. That is how taken I was with
the ridge-walk—the shrub gardens, the swirl of hawks, the trail that eased along a spine of poked-up rocks. And all the while, I was getting ready, seems like now, for the show- down that awaited me back home in Alloway. The one I had not yet even let myself know I was avoiding.
The trail descended some from Alander’s peak, and the shady groves rose taller than our heads. I skipped from flat stone to flat stone through the brush. Sometimes I felt about like I was dancing. Once I did a little shuffle-ball-change under that graying sky, wishing the sun would break back through, while I waited for Coreen to move herself.

I offered her a dried peach from my belt-pack. She would not take it. Soon she stopped again. “Sally?” Her round face begged like a six year old’s. “You need to pee?”

I said I did, which was close enough to true. Trix pulled up, and walkie-talkied to Alessandra, telling her not to worry if we three got farther behind.

I’d always used my shoe-heel to dig a hole for my used tissue, but back at the trailhead, Alessandra asked who needed plastic pack-out bags, if we were “toilet-paper dependent.” I got the point: plenty of people hike that narrow ridge. More than plenty, I guess. I’d only just read on a campground sign how animals dig up buried tissue, and I’ll admit it: garlic-cheese scented pee must smell real interesting to a creature who lives on

grubs and roots.

So who was I to scold when Coreen, bless her, squatted not but ten feet from the trail? I just worked on through the undergrowth another twenty yards. Time I got back, she was plopped on a rock, wiping her nose. “Sally?” she said. “I don’t feel so great. I’m kind of cold.”

Trix shook her head. I did not hear much rattling around inside it when she did.

That is when I saw how things would have to be. I shoved my wool hat on Coreen’s head, and told her in a voice I likely got from Dukes of Hazard that, diet be ding-danged, I declared I would swat her bottom somethin terrble if she dint eat some a them fine dried peaches I had toted all the ways up here. Sometimes you have got to do what you have got to do. The child needed energy, fast. I needed her attention. Coreen giggled. Trix’s eyes got rounder, her cheeks bright red. “That,” she said, “is coercive!” “Got that right, missy,” I told her, in full Mom-mode now. “Coreen. Take you two-three more a these little old things.” I rattled the bag of wrinkled peach-halves like you’d shake a feather at a kitten. “Go won now, honey. Lands sakes—only looks like they’s ears off one them Egyptian mummy-fellers.” Coreen snickered, and ate, and started plodding; our fuel supply was gone now. But she still felt miserable, that was clear. She wrapped her arms across her chest, wedged in under her heavy breasts. Not the best thing for balance, or speed, or for getting her blood to circulate. She had put a flannel shirt on over her t-shirt, but she did not have a jacket and everything she wore was damp with sweat. The wind blew smartly in the open stretches. I kept my jacket zippered, unrolling

the sleeves down over my hands. Even with the hemp-cloth hood and my bandana, I
wished mightily for my hat. Wished we’d move faster too, for warmth. Pretty soon the rain began. Not a downpour, but real steady, soaking through the cracked waterproofing of our hoods. My legs were chilly, but at least my too-long jacket kept my shorts dry—better bare skin than the sopping sweatpants Coreen had sponging round her thighs.
My Environmental Science prof talked about feedback loops. Sometimes they keep a system in balance, sometimes they flip the other way, a runaway corkscrew twirling down and down. That was happening with Coreen, seemed like. Exhausted, she kept walking slower, grunting with every stair-step of the ridgeline, never warming up. It left off raining. She slipped on a rock. Her ankle twisted. For the next half- mile she hobbled gamely, Trix or me taking turns beside her, till we came to where the trail turned down the bluff of Bash Bish Mountain, into the gorge. “Really, ’snot broken,” Coreen said again. “Sawri’. ‘Snot even sprained.” She laughed out loud, real high pitched. “Sorry bout the snot snot snot.” She wiped the corners of her eyes. The situation had gone a ways beyond me getting worn out on Monadnock. I was still just a tourist in nature at that moment. Yet I was coming to a clearer view of how wired-together the whole almighty contraption is. How wired-in we are. Trix tried the walkie-talkie. Useless. Out of range or bouncing off some chunk of rock. No cell phone—and anyhow, who knew if one would work here? Well, well, I said inside my mind. Is this not a fine fix you-all have gotten yourselves into, Sally Ellen?
Daddy would not have had a walkie-talkie, but he would have brought a poncho

and warm clothes, and waterproof matches and a flashlight too. I used to drive Dickie
bananas, toting along an ace bandage and a space blanket every time we took the kids for a Sunday hike at Campbell’s Cove. But I had not thought to grab such things when I left Alloway.
Standing there, staring down the muddiest trail I had seen in years, I felt the cold. Coreen was not giggling now. Her fingers had turned the same yellowy color as the flaking beeswax on our hoods. She’d stopped shivering, too, which was in no way a good sign. We could hear the rush of the current at the bottom of the gorge. We could see the drop-off of the trail. The eco-system of Coreen’s flesh and blood was leaking energy and we had nothing to plug the drain. “Almost to the parking area, ladies,” Trix trilled. She did not point out the metal handrail jammed into the mountainside—useful, sure, but also a sign of just how steep the bluff was.
“Goi’ dow’ on m’ bu’,” Coreen decreed, and I have to say she made a good decision there. Things had come to: do or die or take a gamble on living till a rescue squad got word to haul itself up here for her. She was selecting Door Number One. But pluck is not everything, no matter what my papaw used to say. She simply did not have the strength to pick her way down that bluff-trail standing on her feet. Trix’s face kept getting tighter. She knew about the width and swiftness of Bash Bish Brook, waiting for us at the bottom. We would have to ford it before we reached the parking area where the others waited. I am glad now for my ignorance. I started to chafe Coreen’s hands between my own. “Sawri’, Sally,” she protested. But it was not. And it was going to get worse.

82.

Ridges and woods and waterways are not texts. But we do insist on reading them—as if
that made them ours. As if we knew the runes.
Hard-working Yankee river. That’s what John Greenleaf Whittier, born in 1807 a stone’s throw from its banks, called the Merrimack. Thoreau saw it flowing clear in its
breast like all these beautiful thoughts. Harriet Farley found there relief from the clamor of her life as a Lowell millgirl—shadows of clouds and rocks and trees…transfixed in its
roseate depths. But less than two decades later, the river was to Charles Dickens lightheaded, thoughtless and brisk and young. Kerouac wrote of the thunderous husher of our sleep at night. Today the National Park Service publishes its own blunt metaphor, describing the Merrimack above Pawtucket Dam as an 18-mile-long mill pond.

Thus do we scratch our assorted meanings on the cave-wall of the physical. The
Milky Way, in China, is the heavens’ river, and never mind that other people view it as a
double spiral. Each watercourse is what we make of it. Flight-paths of birds. Runnels of
sap, or blood. Rivulets of igneous rock intruded into older stone. A liquid antler-shape.
Tumbled currents, like corn-rowed hair set loose in long braids.

We can name a river, or re-name it. Call it what you will, however, decipher it in
any of a thousand ways: you must nonetheless know it too is empty of self-essence.

It’s no enduring thing. Yet it’s still a phenomenon unique among phenomena.
Still has its unnamed metamorphoses.

83.

Hank Q writes again. The River Kudzu’s flowing over the dump on Campbell’s Cove
Road. That’s what his latest e-mail has to say. October, Sally, and the leaves are still
bright downy green. Record temps continue. I’ll tell you more if you’ll write back. Or
(and please forgive me for being pesky) call. Some things can’t be put in writing; I hope
you understand.

Hank knows Sally’s reading—or at least opening—his stream of messages, the ones he can’t stop sending. Last time, he quoted his favorite poet: those who know her, know her less / The nearer her they get. Dickinson, of course, referred to “nature”; Hank
was quick to add a few words making that much clear. But he can’t know Sally’s reaction when she makes her way to Moby’s Café and finally picks up the message Ess sent out thirty-six hours before.
Sally came in to the coffee shop bone tired, hoping for something that would cheer and soothe her after yesterday’s events on Alander Mountain and at Bash Bish Brook. She settled for a giant lo-fat carrot-cranberry-bran muffin to accompany her morning brew. She logged on, skimmed Hank’s message. Then opened the one Ess sent her thirty-six hours ago: now, do not worry, maah—the val-man bailed me out… Sally’s coffee geysers from its mug.
An action? What does that mean? Confronting national guardsmen at the entrance to a nuclear waste disposal site? An exorcism of the WHAT?

Sally wipes up, still reading, with her sweatshirt. Jumps to her feet, ready to run
for the payphone down the block. But wait—she’s got a message from Val too, hidden amongst the spam. Maybe her son has written something she needs to know before she calls New Mexico. Or, possibly, drives straight there. Indeed. In somber, mildly baffled tones, Val relates what Ess took for granted. She and the other demonstrators pled No Contest. There will be no trial. He adds that things did stay completely peaceful, that all this had happened before. (“See you next time, Andrew,” he heard one Quaker graybeard tell a deputy as they shook hands.) The case was assigned to the best possible judge. The government wants minimal news, apparently, not celebrity jailbirds—and one of those arrested plays a lovable office cut-up for a half-hour of network sitcom every Tuesday night. What’s more, even the battiest terror-phobe could not accuse these prayerful peaceniks of trying to swipe bomb-makings from the actual waste-storage site, miles from the trespass line. Ess—or more precisely, Val—is out a pile of money for court costs and fines, but if she keeps her nose clean (and, Mom, I do believe she understands this), she won’t serve time. Sally should not worry. All is well.
Sally feels the coffee shop pirouette around her. Her baby’s safe. Her baby whom she did not know to be in danger. She clutches for her cup. It’s as if, late yesterday, she got caught up in an awe-ful whirlpool-eddy below Bash Bish Falls. Perhaps she did.
If you go to Bash Bish Falls in southwest Massachusetts, you’ll learn the name may have come from the word in a lost language for the bashapish bashapish sound the foam-white water makes in its sixty-foot drop over schist and granite. You can watch the

torrent split around a great incisor-boulder that has held there for millenia. You can read
warnings about hikers who have died on—or been rescued from—the gorge’s mighty rocks, the rapids just before the cataract, the deep pool-bowl below. No one died there yesterday. Coreen came close, but that was hypothermia, not drowning or internal organs smashed. She scooted resolutely down the bluff toward green riffles upstream from the waterfall, Sally walking careful-careful after. On the bank, where woods gave way to cobbley shingle, all three stopped. The quick cold flow stretched forty feet across, not a tree-bridge or a stepping stone in sight. Coreen moaned. Sally nudged Trix. They flanked Coreen. Unthinkingly as vines or rivers, their arms twined round each other—shoulders, mid-back, waist, according to their heights. “You have to do it,” Sally said, flat-voiced with exhaustion and with will. She has never bossed an adult before. I’ll brook no nonsense, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Hysteria’s voice welled up within her, sounding like her old tree-buddies Rainbow and Beauregard. “I’ll go first,” cried Trix, preparing to walk out on a gravel-bar, then splash on across a narrow noisy channel. But Sally stopped her. Tactful down-home indirection cast away, she spelled out three things: better to cross at the widest point, where the water runs shallower and slower, only up to Sally’s knees. Also, shoes and socks must be stripped off. Bare feet grip better when the current tugs. Also, they would go together. The two began complying. “One more thing,” said Sally. “The hoods stay here. We sure as sugar cannot wear them while we cross. We’ll hide them somewhere. Over behind that mess of brush. I expect they’ll biodegrade real quick.” The restrictive hoods went off; vision opened. The tricky fording began: a step, a step, a slip, a catch, a step. Surprisingly, perhaps, the other H.O.P.E.-fuls hadn’t thought

to post someone at bankside to lend a hand. Surprisingly, given the threesome’s fatigue,
the water’s insistence, the uncertainty of the rocky godly ground at the swift stream’s bottom, no one fell. They made it, moving slow. Up on the opposite bank at last, Sally patted Coreen on the back. The big girl grunted. Tears leaked from her eyes—only a couple hundred easy yards left to the parking lot. Sally covered with a quiet cheer. After that, events moved quickly. Coreen was bundled off hospital-wards in the Prius with Trix and Lubie and Kokop’ele and his flute, sipping hot herb tea from someone’s thermos, car heater on full blast. All understood that this must happen first, that Lubie and Kokop’ele would then go get the van and ferry the others to Great Barrington.
As the banged-up Prius departed, Rich-or-Mitch and Alessandra pressed lunch remnants and a towel on Sally. Shanti Jennifer invited her to join them in some chanting; they’d be here for a while.
“We’re getting a universe-message here, people,” Rich-or-Mitch announced. “It’s called, acceptance.”
“Dude—seriously,” said Newnie, chewing on a twist of seaweed. But Sally did not feel especially accepting at that moment. She wasn’t freezing, but she was cold, even with her quick-dry long-sleeved t-shirt beneath her tentlike jacket. In the last hours on the trail, she kept thinking of Emerson: Traveling is a fool’s paradise. She felt she grasped his point now.
What then should she do next?
“Circle up, people.” Rich-or-Mitch swung one arm, beckoning. “Let’s chant.”

“Scuse me, but I believe I will go down and take a gander at those falls,” Sally
said. “Hate to miss them after all that effort. Any of you-all…?” But, thank Gaia, they’d already hiked the short trail to the torrent and done their purification rites, the minute the drizzle stopped. How nice for you, thought Sally. That where you were when Coreen and Trix and I crossed the water alone?
Shanti Jennifer laid one long hand on Sally’s shoulder. “I did not join them for the shakti-puja—the energy-offering,” she half-whispered, “believing it best you not discover no one awaiting you here when you arrived.” Oh. Sally felt herself warming to the Wisconsin yogi—but she still wanted solitude at the falls.
“I have been there many times,” Shanti Jennifer said. “A place of puissance, and the walk down and back not difficult. Benefits will accrue, should you take that path.” Her gaze insinuated into Sally’s, the red spot on her forehead just a little smudged. “Go. What pulls the waters downward pulls them on.” Next morning, sitting dizzy in Moby’s belly, computer screen bright before her, still digesting the messages from Ess and Val, Sally calms herself with the final un-spilt sip of milky coffee. She wonders if Shanti Jennifer somehow knew what waited at the bottom of that wide trail.
It does not, for a very long time, occur to Sally that maybe the earnest silly devotions of the H.O.P.E.-fuls helped bring about what happened to her by the waterfall. That maybe her own mindful hiking did.

84.

How can one day be so glorious, and so purely horrible? That is what I asked myself as I
started down the trail to Bash Bish Falls. I’d been brave and frightened, rude and strong, defeated and lifted up by this world’s beauty, all on the same hilltop. Trotting along, I wished Coreen godspeed on her way to the ER, meanwhile swatting down a couple or three less charitable thoughts—she still had my nice warm lilac-colored toboggan-hat. The waterfall. I swear the sight of it turned out to be as mixed-up as the day: both downright scary and what professors call sublime. Its rumbling filled the cleft cut through that rock, like some language I had studied up on but not really learned. The branches round the swirling pool below my lookout point stretched into the light. Looked to me like they were reaching toward the plunging foam. It is little wonder, really, that the two of them showed up there. First off, I saw the woman from Campbell’s Cove. Standing right smack in the middle of the pounding spray. Antlered. Eyes heavy-lidded. Holding out her hand. Then I felt the gray-man near. I turned. He sat beside me where I’d settled to stare toward the eddies in the pool. His non-skin brushed mine: i part from you. Not a hallucination—finally I knew that. He was real as those great-branched chestnut ghosts my papaw used to see. Real as the haze that blues the mountains around Alloway. Real as running water. Real as ashes after fire, I guess. Real as anything, and leaving. All at once, I knew for certain I did not want that.

I placed my palm against his, like on that campground boulder back at the end of May.
You won’t stay? I thought to him. Or can’t? Silence. I asked why he took a human shape, when he was not. this is the form your kind can see. the one form it grants full recognition. That
stung, I have to say.
But why, that last time, at Monadnock? Why did—? you ask the same question. His hand brushed my arm again. so you would pay
attention. see that you don’t live apart.
I cannot say what I felt then. Informed, I guess, like: oh. I had not been possessed, exactly. A connection it had surely been—sure, a hook-up, except more like him saying hey there, you awake? A connection I do not think will ever leave my mind entirely.
But I still did not get all he meant for me to get. there’s work you should do. for sake of many beings.
What work?
it’s necessary that you act to limit suffering.
What work?
you’ll know.
The falls kept crashing. I did not speak, not even in my mind. as you know every planet dies.
Then he vanished and then I saw him once again across the pool (the last time ever it would be), standing side by side with the woman in the downpour. Her form too had a sharpness now. Her hair tumbled—why had I not seen this earlier?—in long thin

braids. They clasped hands. She turned a palm toward me, and this time I saw for
certain: it was marked with a symbol I’d seen among the knick-knacks on a windowsill at the House of Yoga. The eight-spoked wheel of the dharma, Anna called it. Later, a woman named Harper Frank would tell me what-all it means. Their breathing rang inside my head. A higher portion of the water’s voice said hello. farewell. After that, they went invisible. I’d been wrong back home, up on
Chestnut Ridge. Seeing the gray-man had not been about sex at all. Or, making love was just a channel. A fracture in the rock. It started to come on evening. Tongues of gray-green, foamy backflows, all tangled round each other, rushed toward the Atlantic. The two did not return. How could it be true, I thought, that planets die? Well. Are we not seeing it happen, right now, to this one—and way too fast, if enough of those feedback loops go wrong? What’s happening to the polar ice? A while later, I don’t know how long, I hauled myself back to the parking area. Dusk had thickened. Shanti Jennifer nodded, but just then Flute-man pulled up in his van. In the hoorah of news and greetings, she stayed silent, only slipped into the front seat. Right off, Flute-man told us about Coreen—time they’d reached the ER, she was already doing better. We pretty much kept quiet for the dark drive to Great Barrington. It was when I started walking over to my truck, my darling rattle-laden chugging bright red Yo-truck, that Shanti Jennifer stepped up behind me, hushed as smoke. “Tomorrow you will go to Lenox town?” she asked me. Her voice came sudden but I did not jump. “You have proven yourself capable today. I know Coreen. I know that Trix.” She waggled her head side to side on her reedy neck. “But you—I believe

you seek a better place to live. I can tell you of a good one. A home for two weeks or for
longer, as you wish. Perhaps you’ll care to hear more, when you are not so very tired.” This gave me the skin-crawling heebie-jeebies, till my eye fell on the October Mountain campground pass lying on my dashboard. I figured that explained things. She knew these parts. Most anyone camping there a while would drive into Lenox sometime. Maybe I’d left a Moby’s Café go-cup on the seat—dead giveaway. I had not, as it turned out. But next morning Shanti Jennifer walked into the café just as I was finally logging off. Downtown Lenox—three blocks, four—does not have many places someone on my budget might hang out. “Sally.” She tipped her head toward the computer. “Ah. I see you know Coreen is well. May I treat you to a coffee?” I checked my watch. Still early—better to call the kids an hour from now. Val’s message had eased my mind considerably. My plan for the day was, do some laundry, rest up, try real hard to have faith in my daughter, figure out the remainder of my life. The gray-man said I had work to do, but I did not see how I could go with anything as vague as that. Most all my money from Caledonia had passed on into Yankee cash registers and I’d done literary pilgrimages enough to kill a well-read cat. But I surely had no urge to hurry back to Alloway and get caught up in the mess with Dickie and Hank Q and the fire.
Besides, what with the spill when I read Ess’s e-mail, I had not gotten all that much coffee into my system yet that morning. “Well, Shanti Jen—,” I said. Then nodded, half yes-ma’am and half a bow. “Thank you, Shanti. I would truly love a cup. And I am real curious. What is this place you wanted to talk to me about?”

85.

The global center of operations for the World Repurification Order, in tiny Naniquaben,
Massachusetts—east of the Connecticut River, south of the Mohawk Trail—shares quarters with a much more public institution, the Naniquaben Self-Care and Juvenation Spa. The main building is a huge three story inn, built as a summer-time getaway for Gilded Age well-to-do, back before air conditioning made life so much more pleasant, at least in the short run, at least for some upon Sol III.

Every planet dies. That’s one phrase that absolutely shall not, no no shall not, be
allowed to loop through Sally Paradiso’s head this morning as she plunges her arms into a sink of sudsy water in the kitchen of that former inn. It will be some time before she hears within herself the nova-bright rejoinder, yes, but does it not matter how painfully, how soon?

So many other phrases have been ringing round her in the long full week since she drove here to do heart-service in this twenty-first century Fruitlands, the Naniquaben Community. Self-improvement is soul-improvement. Cleanse the body to cleanse the world. Our Teacher is the conqueror of sorrow. Leonard lives.

The last one is a kind of in-joke, one of many by which the resident community (newcomers and short-timers more-or-less included) distinguishes itself from the spa- guests they so expensively serve—serve with the finest health cuisine and endless polishing-the-faucets housekeeping, with skin-care and body-energetics therapies and

massages of far-flung ethnicities, with Conscious Self-Befriending and Integrative
Lifestyle/Soulstyle Facilitation and personalized spirit-coaching ceremonials and Bliss- Birth Retreats. No one ever laughs at the guests, who, Sally’s noticed, do leave looking happier than when they arrive. But the Naniquaben Community (that World Repurification Order is rarely mentioned in Sally’s hearing) likes its little jokes.

Leonard Lives? Yes, indeed, but how could Leonard, dear Teacher Leonard, not? One recent evening, at Room-Covenant Heart-Share-Time, the very notion drew chuckles from the eleven other women in Sally’s bunkroom, a Quonset hut in the Community Haven down the hill. That One which Teacher manifests with full consciousness is beyond all limits of TSMPD, time-space-matter-perceptual-differentiation. Consequently, so is he. Leonard not live? As soon believe that he could err!

Sally smiled along. What in heaven’s name had she gotten herself into? But then her Mentor-Sister, bone-thin white-haired Harper Frank, cut her sane and sparking eyes toward Sally as if to say, don’t freak—we’ll rap about this, kiddo.

Actually, that conversation with Harper has not yet come to pass. But other interesting things have, or they will. What will impress our heroine most deeply will be what happens inside her when Teacher Leonard leads the Community in Energy-Body Meditation.

Sally has to wait for that, however. Teacher Leonard’s still out in redwood country, finishing up the Fall West Coast Retreat in a brand-new glass-and-polished- granite center built for him by grateful Students. But at morning Duty Greeting on her seventh day in Naniquaben, word arrives.

“He might come back tomorrow! His India trip’s postponed! Oh, oh, Selves—a

Junior on Planning Team just got a call from California!” A ringlet-headed honey-blonde
named Maya scuttles in from the Dining Chapel—6:29 a.m. and the Clean Team’s Self- Circle is about to close. Sally knows that Maya dropped out of Skidmore six years back, came here via Katmandu, Seattle, and Belize. They sleep in the same bunkroom, where Selves may share such trivial details, although even there too much clutter-talk is frowned upon.
Old life? Gone life! New life? Now! That’s how Shanti Jennifer puts it—
personal histories mean so little in light of the true nature of existence, as revealed by Teacher to those who can understand. Sally finds this silence a relief.

Now Maya beams. She worms her trim, curvy body into the Self-Circle, detecting an entry point between Heidi, the freckled menopausal Heart-Service Guide, and a lanky young bronze-skinned man named Frederick, who wears the storeroom keys on his necklace of red seeds, claws, old Chinese coins. Clever Maya, to snuggle up to Heidi, Sally thinks. Heidi does not like it when you’re late. Arrive after Self-Circle closes and you wind up looking at people’s backs while they bond with Chant & Hug.

But Maya’s news trumps all. Heidi waits while talk bursts out, dies off. The group moves into Chant & Hug. They greet individual duties (“Ave, Chapel sweeping!” “Ave, afternoon high-traffic-bathrooms spot-check!”) as Frederick reads off their assignments for the day. Heidi has put Sally on pots and pans again. Well, why not? What gets dirty must be washed and frankly, the conviction that housework too can be a spiritual practice—well, that’s part of why she came here for a couple weeks. A stronger purer new life can be hers, one free of the old life’s dilemmas,

its roiling woes. Ave, pots and pans!

Upon hearing Teacher Leonard for the first time, she’ll start thinking that a couple weeks in Naniquaben may not be quite enough. Before that, though—in fact, the very next day after lunch—Sally (now on Floor Care Squad with Maya) gives her all to vacuuming the lobby’s handmade Turkish rugs. Or tries to. Last night she saw Dickie behind bars, drowning in a pool of yellowed water. She saw Arjay laughing his hateful Arjay laugh, and twirling a heavy keychain round his finger, until he threw it at her; it turned into a poisoned arrow, and the terror woke her up. She’s certain that if Mister Calloway’s indicted, Hank Q will e-mail her the news so fast the electrons will peel rubber. Then she’ll do what she does not want to: speak up. Meanwhile, she’ll keep hoping no one stumbles onto evidence about the ownership of the land. Arson? Oh, who knows, who knows?

Self is self is Self is self is easeful, she chants underneath her breath.
The front door opens. Sally stops the ravenous Hoover. It’s custom here to pause all cleaning in the lobby when guests arrive for check-in, to stand and bow and bid them welcome. Simple courtesy, Heidi said. Makes sense.

A round-shouldered man in his mid-forties—black curls clipped short, faint beard-shadow on his fleshy jaw, pale eyes intelligent and alight—strides in. A regal Scot in a tight pink Chanel suit holds the door for him. A stunning Latina follows, clutching two computer cases, wearing Birkenstocks and a floaty skirt. Two men from South Asia—upper-class Bengalis maybe, by the look of them—walk in last, carrying hand luggage, joking quietly in almost-Oxbridge accents. Maya, gorgeous Maya, gasps.

This is no spa-guest.

“Ave, you temporarily-mobile skeletons!” Teacher Leonard roars with laughter, lifts his hands like a referee jubilantly signaling touchdown, nodding with equanimity to the hushed crew behind the reception desk, to scattered spa-guests lounging in puffy armchairs, to the Network Team member putting flyers into mailboxes, to Sally and Maya, frozen not twelve feet away.

Does he wink in their direction? Leonard’s aviator-glasses are lightly tinted, so Sally can’t be sure. But his words continue caressing everyone in earshot—including a few more Community members just slipped out from the Front Office. “Hello, all my dear Selves. How it fulfils a needy heart, to come into this home! What are Majorca, Gorakhpur, Grand Cayman, Humboldt County, when Naniquaben welcomes Self with joy?”

Maya and the other old hands nod and murmur, “Ave, Self.” Sally and several of the spa-guests follow suit. “Tonight,” Maya hisses when Teacher and those trailing after him have passed on to his Residence in the new wing. “He might give a talk tonight. Won’t get posted on the Schedule Board, so stay alert. If it’s in the Teaching Chapel, some guests will be there. But if it’s down in the Community Chamber, it’s just for us.”

She grins and shivers. Her eyes kindle, as if someone has lighted a bank of votive candles within her skull. “Sally! Promise you’ll tell me if you hear!”

86.

PARADISO BROTHERS’ CONTRACTING
since 1983

new construction . remodeling
commercial . residential
Make your home or place of business a genuine paradise!

Dear Brother,
While I am off on my vacation, I want you to think over what I am about to say here. We have got ourselves into a situation and it is wrong. I have come across some information about the ownership of a piece of property, you know the one I mean. You and I are going to find us a smart lawyer and we are going to make things right. I will not let you talk me down.

We have been a team since we were boys trying to look out for our Mama. We still are one. Only, some things will be changing, that is all. See you when I get back in town.

Dickie

87.

I cannot say exactly, looking back, just what-all struck me the day I first followed Shanti
Jennifer into the Naniquaben Community. What I think of now is sometimes what I miss about the place, and sometimes what I just plain missed. The Students wearing headphones while they worked—I must have noticed them right off, although I had no earthly idea it was tapes of Teacher Leonard talking, not Phish or Mozart, they were listening to. The front garden’s Shrine to The New Paradigm, with its flowers and offerings of salt, I did not pick up on that day. Shanti hustled me in through a side door marked Community Only. I do remember being surprised there were no pictures on the pine-paneled walls, just the one life-sized portrait of Leonard in the Dining Chapel, over the fieldstone fireplace, plus a few photos of him here and there, like you might set out a favorite snapshot of your daddy in a silver frame. Mostly the place felt restful, on the surface anyway. And easy on the eyes. Rock gardens, cute cabins behind the shingled inn, fountain all sing-song in the super-modern spa building, beaver pond in the woods at the bottom of the hill where I went walking any chance I got. Real nice.
Also, it was mighty interesting. The Universal Practice Enhancements Shop sold thirty-eight kinds of Tarot cards, and worship aids from every world religion. Plus books and clothes you do not commonly run into in a town like Alloway. The ninety-dollar raw silk carry-bags for yoga mats I paid no mind to—anybody who bought one probably had

spent that much at some point on a bottle of fermented grape juice. Why get worked up?
I recollect how people in the community greeted me extra friendly when Shanti told them I was come to do heart-service, not as a guest. And it knocked me out to discover health food cooked for a couple hundred or so people could taste that good. No need to rush on out of here, Sally Ellen, I told myself at my first dinner. Not if they serve black-eyed peas with tamari and tomatillos and fresh cilantro every Thursday night.

Mama used to say I go off on a tear way too easily, and I surely had been itching to find a place to live a while that was both centrally heated and not-Alloway. But I am not a flibberty-gibbet and I swear I did not head there in a flibberty-gibbet way. At Moby’s, as we finished off our coffee, I told Shanti I had business to take care of, so I could not answer right then about going with her to this retreat center she’d been telling me about.
First off, I had a long phone conversation with Val and Ess. My baby girl was determined to kick up her heels, seemed like, but she was not in prison and there was nothing I could do for her. I will admit I admired her spunk, although I could not bring myself to say so at the time.
Then I sat in the humming laundromat, trying to give this Community place some thought. The sound of Bash Bish Falls kept running through me, stirring something up. Work for me to do? But…a planet dying—how could I, or anyone, fix that? The thought of being obliged to try made me want to crawl into a hole. Folding towels has always settled me. I made neat warm piles, stacked socks on top of underwear on top of t-shirts. Maybe the gray-man meant for me to go to Naniquaben? I had no reason to think that, really, but I also had discovered none for

thinking any other thing. And this might be a chance for me to front only the essential
facts of life, as young Henry put it once.
What harm in giving the place a try? Nonnie Bee or the Earth Wisdom folks would go for hanging out in a health spa-slash-spiritual asylum faster than a Martinsville Speedway pit crew can swap out a flat. Both kids said it sounded good. I could be a volunteer and take free yoga classes for a couple or three weeks. Then I’d head home all pepped up, find myself a job, begin the financial aid rigmarole for Caledonia, start taking care of business. By which I meant, and they knew I meant, get started with their daddy on the divorce. Still, none of us felt inclined to say that word out loud. I could not avoid Hank Q and his suspicions, whatever they were, forever. But why not put off Alloway till November? He’d probably be interested in someone, no, something else by then.
Shanti assured me the purifying celibate heart-service lifestyle would resonate with my deeper consciousness-essence. Val allowed as how there was much to be learned from alternative medical traditions. Ess loved that the Community uses only post-consumer recycled paper products. “Maah,” she said, “it’ll be a free vacation, except you clean the shower stalls. But yo—two serious yoga classes a day, plus like breathing exercises and discounts on the spa stuff? No place like that back home.”

She surely did call that one right.

Next day I broke camp and met up with Shanti at Moby’s, then followed her a couple hours east and north to Naniquaben. She was going to lead a Past-Lives Chelation workshop over the coming weekend, so I would not see her much. She’d called Heidi, though, and sure enough, they had room for another heart-service worker. Later, I found

out they were running short-handed, actually. Shanti Jennifer had been recruiting.
The only big rule was the minimum two-week commitment, but Shanti explained that right up front—community stability. Also a no-perfumes policy, out of respect for persons with fragrance sensitivities, and a request for modest clothing, which really only meant, please do not traipse around half-naked unless you are a first-time guest and have not yet caught on.
Shoot, a lot of the rules at Naniquaben were like that—something to catch on to. No one said, “You are required to stop three times a day and concentrate on breathing for eight breaths.” But right on the hour, at ten, two, and four, whoever you were with went stock-still and closed their eyes, and if you asked, they said, “Oh, we do that here. Breath Focus Time. Teacher recommends it.” So you joined in. Truth is, that one felt real good, once I got the hang of it. I still do it now and then and it has given me a clearer view of life. Other things plain tickled me, although I did not let on. The row of women leaning over the bathroom sinks at dawn, for instance, washing out their nostrils with baby teapots. And do not get me started on the Intestinal- Purity workshop. But the notion of a “news fast”—at Naniquaben there’s no TV, no radios or newspapers, and a big sign over the one public internet-access computer says Do You Really Want to Know? That surely was a balm for me.
I still believe most people there were truly searching to make something better of themselves. Which is more than I can say for many who exhale what you and I breathe in. To my mind it is better to be aiming toward awakening, even if the path you’re on has potholes, and maybe a few hairpin curves. Some folks I met in the Community were among the planet’s finest. Harper for one, and Frederick. I surely found that out, come

the time I needed someone at my back.
It was right off, when Shanti took me in to meet her, that Harper gave me the big old hug I did not even know I craved. “Hello, kiddo,” she said. “Welcome home.” Her arms felt strong for someone so wrinkled and not but a tiny bit taller than me. When I all of the sudden started sniffling, she held on a heartbeat longer. Next, she offered me a handkerchief—a real hankie, not a throwaway—and an out-of-this- world smile. “Worry not, kiddo,” Harper said. “You’re probably tired. But hey, here you are.”
Tired, I thought. Why, yes I am. Heidi looked as if she’d bit into a pickle,
expecting sweet and getting sour. She began explaining only crazy Selves choose negative emotions. Harper laughed like an archangel wrangling a rambunctious cherub and told Heidi to lay off.
That’s how Harper was, tough as nails and a genuine creature of love: bodhisattva is the best word I’ve heard for folks like her. She’d knocked around from one ashram to another since the sixties. She never looked down on newcomers like me or the other heart-service people, who could get somewhat sullen about doing eight hours of housework, especially the ones still basically on the run from growing up. Anyhow, hearing a couple more rules from Harper that first evening—awarenesses, people called them there—did not bother me.
No personal items on the bunkroom windowsills except plants or crystals? No food in the bunkroom unless you were “cleansing”, which I right away figured out meant sick? Well, those awarenesses were only common sense. That old Quonset had to hold a

bunch of people. Why add ants and mice to the population—especially since the
Community was real solid on not using toxic chemicals. Being assigned a bunk according to my Chinese Five Elements type? My first thought was, harmless. Shanti told Harper I was clearly Water Dominant-Wood Minor, with a streak of Fire, so I could sleep anywhere except in the west. Harper grinned and said she would bear that in mind.
But after a week of seeing every dish in the food line marked with the element- types it suited, that came to seem a natural way of building heart-service energy. And by the time Heidi explained the No Spiritual Voyeurism sign in the Community Chamber— well, by that time, the Community had revealed itself as pretty nearly the sanest place in this loony-bin of a country, god bless it, far as I could see. That is how I got to thinking. That is what everybody said: “Man, this Self used to be such a crazy-head!” How we cackled whenever someone used that line. “Self, listen to Leonard!” we’d cry in response.
The morning of the stovefire—now, that is when I truly latched onto the notion that the Community was what I needed. This happened near the end of my second week. Considering the way days passed there, with Breath Focus Times and Room-Covenant Heart-Shares, with surprise talks now and then from Leonard, with Gladness-Chanting on Friday, Saturday, Tuesday evenings, with those delicious yoga classes whenever I could fit one in—considering all that, it felt more like my second month. I’d just extended my heart-commitment to four weeks and Heidi had rotated me onto the Body-Nurture Team. So I was chopping kale.
Chopping kale when someone I never figured I would see again strolled in

through the Dining Chapel door.
I’d spent the last three hours on veggie prep, contented when I focused on the cutting board, the knife. But I kept coming back to something Maya said the night before, how she had to lose herself—no, how her old self had to be defeated—before she really got the Teachings. Got how beautifully they all fit together, like Charlotte’s web, she said.
That sounded like the kind of thing I expect mystics and such have said for centuries—at least, mystics who did not read much after the fourth grade. Only, I could not get clear on what-all the Teachings were, exactly. New ones kept popping up and once when someone asked about a contradiction between Leonard’s big wall-chart of the Kosmos Sentience Modality and his one of the Hollow-Hearted Vanguard Paradigm, he pretended like he did not understand the question, just said, “What do you mean?” until the questioner got all red-faced and shut up. In his talks, Teacher mostly proved to us how much we Crazy-Selves needed the Teachings, and how the really crazy Selves in the rest of the world needed them even more, especially given the terrible times that will soon be coming down.
I grabbed another pile of leaves and shook it dry. What that meant, seemed like, (although he did not out-and-out say it, ever) was that we all needed him. Now, there is nothing quite as good as kale for fortifying the retina with vitamins, and I have always loved to eat a mess of greens. But it cooks down quite a bit, so if you are given the service of chopping kale enough for seventeen dozen people, you may greet your duty with an open Self, but you will be chopping for some time. Of course, I told myself, it was just arrogance—pride-head clutter-talk, we called it—to think I was ready

to hear core Teachings so soon. Or could really spot contradictions in those charts, when
everyone else kept studying them over and over again. I was not an accepted Junior Student yet, had not even declared myself Aspiring. But the other problem was that Maya did not strike me as the mystic type. More like the perkiest and sincerest aerobics instructor you would ever care to meet. And a sweetheart. Still, call me ornery, she also struck me as pure ditz. I flopped my hands around some to loosen them, and sighed. “Hey-ho, new Self! In service, liberation. You cluttering with negativity?” The fellow grimacing down at me looked real familiar. His voice was even more so—as if I’d heard him when I couldn’t see him, or when he was… In disguise. Yes, as the king of winter, or Mister Hard Times A-Comin, or whoever he had rigged himself out to be, all covered in ragged strips of white. Malthus, the young ranger from Mount Monadnock, it was. Last time I saw him, he waved a sword and swore to kill Green Jack.
“Ave, Self!” I said. “This Self is crazy, but she’s easeful.” It was real simple, talking in the Community. There are a certain number of phrases you can recycle for almost any purpose. Kind of resting to the brain. “How’s things in New Hampshire?” He blinked. Looked down at my face again. I mentioned camping at Monadnock.
Come to find out, Malthus was one of the Students who go out into the world and work, then return to the fold. Bringing their paychecks with them—one hundred percent voluntarily. Same as Shanti Jennifer. But at that point I was not paying any mind to the Community’s money side. For one thing, I had not yet seen Fiona pass out the home-

study course order forms to people who’d just done a weekend workshop practicing Self-
Healing & Prosperity Through Kosmos-Sentience-Fulfillment. She’d guide them into a Kosmos trance, then croon, “Take out your pens and credit cards.” That day in the kitchen, I learned Monadnock stands less than an hour’s drive from Naniquaben, is all. Learned Malthus felt real comfortable making clutter-talk, long as I would listen, and keep chopping, while he watched. This was fine with me—the other item jumbling round my mind was Dickie’s birthday, coming soon. We were way past swapping presents, but this kept pulling my attention in his direction.
“…So after so much worldly clutter, this Self’s needy heart’s fulfilled, I tell you, hanging up the ranger hat and coming home. But don’t you wonder what’s happening, new Self, all these troubles in the Middle East, around Megiddo’s plain? You’ve heard what Teacher says—All things pass but there are times true Selves must rise to action?” No, I had not heard that. Malthus’s eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled upward for an instant, like they did back in the state park. I’d been seeing that a lot lately, come to think of it, in Senior Students on the Energy-Body Meditation Team, who were doing intensive EB Meditation as heart-service to benefit all of us. Lord, even I knew Energy- Body Meditation was mighty powerful stuff. The thing it does had happened for me once when Teacher Leonard led a special session down in the Community Chamber. I admit it—I was real eager to have it click in again, if I could earn the chance. But I do not feel real comfortable with that subject. I’ll just say there are some strong reasons people stick close to Leonard like they do. Anyway, right then I found myself distracted. Not five feet away, a fellow named

Feather had put three big skillets of chopped onions on the gas stove to sauté, then
knocked over a bottle of olive oil and walked off, listening to Leonard on his headphones, looking for a sponge. A whoosh of blue flames leapt across the stovetop. Malthus lunged for the fire extinguisher. But: nothing. Or, only a squint at the label, and slow examination of its pressure-indicator, the safety lock, the release. He was the spitting image of a congressional committee requesting further evidence that we might maybe have an environmental problem on our hands. “Malthus!” Mannerly or not, Crazy-Self-protecting or not, I had to get him moving. I remembered Coreen. “Do it!” Nothing. That committee was ruling out alarmist claims like mine. They had a responsibility to consider the economic impact of putting out the fire at that point in the election cycle. And no doubt studies funded by the private sector’s American Institute for Gas-Explosion Research indicted that the future is not easy to predict. I grabbed a box of baking soda, dumped it. Not enough. The flames spread, eating oil. What next? The wooden countertop? The whole stove?
“I’ve got water!” A sploosh of water on a grease fire? The voice was Malthus’s, but lord only knows what had happened to his brain. Guess that particular sub-committee had adjourned.
I turned. Fire extinguisher abandoned, he held a soup pan full of water. Guaranteed to send flames floating every which-way, doubling our problem fast as bunny rabbits breeding in the springtime. His arms began their swing. Only one thing to do: I tipped that pan away from the stove (which unfortunately

meant pouring the water onto Malthus) and pushed past him to the big old hamper full of
dirty dishtowels. Snatching an armload, I shoved my way back again, ignoring whatever he was sputtering, and dumped the dampish towels to snuff the flames. Success. At least, after another kitchen worker dumped more towels. It was Frederick, quick, unruffled. A stovetop grease-fire smothered. No big deal. But a powerful lot of carrying on came next. Back-slapping for me—“Ave, clever Self!” said Frederick, saluting and laughing and wrapping an arm around my shoulder. Serious teasing for Malthus after someone figured why his shirt and pants kept dripping on the kitchen floor. “Best hope we don’t tell Teacher, Mal-Self,” Feather chortled. “No way you belong on the New-Day Action Team!” Neither of these attitudes suited me one bit. Not when I was aiming to let go of crazy-head Ego. Not when I saw the mean, private look Malthus pitched toward me, underhand and real slow. New-Day Action Team? I thought. Soon as I could, I got myself out of there. At morning Duty Greeting, Frederick had announced my half-day off would be that afternoon, so I skipped lunch and hung out in the woods around the beaver pond, alone. First time in days. Thing was, the fire made me see how much I cared for the Community—what if the inn had burned? Maybe some in it were not perfect. Yet there were plenty of folks I liked. There was a daily rhythm and a meaning…
I looked out at the flooded pond, the stacked sticks forming the beavers’ lodge. No. Liking did not amount to anything but more clutter. Shanti said the Community transcended such kinds of thing. Teacher Leonard had it right. I was crazy-stupid, full of Ego, nowhere close to being ready for what he could give.

But if a fellow the likes of Malthus could do Energy-Body Meditation work, then,
someday, couldn’t I?
I touched the tooth marks on a gnawed-off tree stub. Like Henry Thoreau, the beavers had built themselves a real snug home. Me, my kids were safe and there was nothing going on in Alloway at present that I had any say-so in. Seemed like I had no inkling of how to make myself a decent life in a world that ordinary well-meaning folks like me were using for a landfill. But surely I had the heart- sense, as Harper put it, to go farther on this path. Surely I could do what it takes to become a Junior Student.
Surely I could give myself a break from fretting. Settle in. Take Self-refuge, I’d heard Teacher Leonard say.

88.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
RE: big decision

all cool here, sweet maah. check this: The white stones were mountains, then they went traveling. The pink stones also were part of a mountain before the glacier’s tongue gathered them up.
you want American Romanticism, mother o mine, read Mary Oliver. news flash: living people write good stuff too.
sorry: cheap shot. i take it back. i’m just a little weirded out by yr last e-mail. spiritual journeys are the greatest & i thot it wuz cool when you decided to stay on @ that place another couple weeks but… you don’t really mean what you wrote about going TOTALLY incommunicado for a month? doing a deep retreat, whatever that means, with some dood who sez you best not communicate with your family even? & we’re not supposed to worry????
maah, the duh truck just pulled up. it’s got a special delivery message for you: call your kids. they’re mega-worried. call: ess

89.

From:
rvp2@med.unm.edu
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
RE: big decision

Dearest Mother,

I was interested to learn of your deepening commitment to your new community. Religious exploration at midlife (or, I suppose, at any time) is a healthy thing. Yet obligations to the workaday world remain, don’t they? Ess seems quite shaken by this severing of all contact, regardless of what your Teacher (please note that I capitalize, per your usage) requires. Or, as you say, strongly suggests.

I myself am doing fine, except for my concern regarding the somewhat totalizing nature of his suggestions. So I simply add that I have done some research on Teacher Leonard. I do not wish to offend you, or to scare you off in any way, but he can be fairly characterized as a controversial figure. Some say worse.

I will not attempt to persuade you to anything you do not wish to do. Yet I think it best that we talk things over in a rational manner. Sara works till eleven our time Wednesday and Thursday of this week; I will make a point of being in the apartment both evenings, so we may speak freely. Please do call. I love you. Ess does too.

Val

90.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
yo?

come on, maah. call. write. something. this is getting way too freaky.

91.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
EMERGENCY!

call now. before 6:30 tomorrow morning. too huge to tell you why by e-mail. life or death, no lie.

BOOK VII: PLANETARY MINDFULNESS: A PRIMER

What mystery pervades a well!
That water lives so far—
A neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar

Whose limit none have ever seen,
But just his lid of glass—
Like looking every time you please
In an abyss’s face!

—Emily
Dickinson

92.

The renaissance of Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, and its introduction
on new turf: these—as Sally Paradiso’s noticed—offer lessons worth observing. First, even after appalling slaughter (the population fell to maybe 1/600th in the beavers’ case), some species, sometimes, can come back. Second, turned loose in new lands (Europe and South America, for C. canadensis), that same species, like a certain primate, may crowd out natives, become an
alarming pest.
And finally, for all that beavers’ dams enrich their habitat (providing homes and food to a new melange of animals, insects, plants), these determined mammals are nonetheless quite capable of eating and breeding, and breeding and eating, till they wipe out their food supply.
So far, the beavers living downhill from the Naniquaben Community haven’t overrun their habitation. So far, they’ve still got places they can move to when they do. Right now, it’s November (the Beaver Moon, if you prefer) and above their lodge these crisp New England mornings, thin steams rise from ventilation holes, marking their moist out-breaths. But Sally rarely gets into the leafless woods to see what’s up. She rarely has—by choice, by choice—one unregulated moment. Some people she happens to know, however, do. In one crook of the glittering, breezy Chesapeake Bay, along Annapolis’ lively City Dock, a happy heterosexual couple

wanders among the loosely-woven crowd. Both stand exactly five-foot-six. The man has
wavy salt-and-pepper hair, a hint of the Mediterranean in a tanned face with a Scots-Irish jaw. The woman (she is younger by a dozen years, carries a determined look about her eyes) wears her hair pulled up and back, released at the crown in a cloud of African glory. Her skin’s plum-dark; her fluid spine is straight. Others round about (dads pushing strollers, kids with ice-cream on this too-warm- spell Friday afternoon, café sitters, skaters flaunting skill and daring, boaters heading for a beer) glance at them and register: varietal difference within the species. And holding hands—good heavens! Some smile, some frown, some weasel their gazes away.

The lovers by and large ignore this. They point out to one another party boats (actual yatching caps! bikinis with martinis!), and nostalgic schooners boarding passengers sunset-bound. The two swap stories. He’s just finished a day of sailing school—his long-secret wish, her birthday gift to him. She’s been visiting cousins, poring over nineteenth-, eighteenth-, seventeenth-century records, extending her genealogy.
He offers to come along and help tomorrow. Bout time you learned the darker side of history, baby, she says, then laughs with the smallest possible edge and kisses him
on the cheek. They watch the light refracting off the waves. They feel content.

Up north in Naniquaben, Sally’s troubled. She’s fetching water from a faucet that draws on the Community’s own well.
So many here drink only bottled water. She finds this slightly shocking—the expenditure, the shipping, the plastic that may or may not really be recycled, the whole idea that you can’t trust the water from a tap. Also the faith that if it’s sold it must be

pure. Yet she’d hardly bring the issue up with either spa guests or the other workers.
Unwritten rules aside, most seem so childlike. Seem more naïve, with their self-care and consuming inner journeys, than folks back in blue-collar Alloway. Sally’s guess is, they can’t imagine living where the water’s uncorrupted. Or why anyone would want to drink what isn’t labeled, screw-topped, tamed. But what has she been drinking all these years? Just how clean is the water from Campbell’s Cove?

She shakes her head at that last thought. She’s in the Teaching Chapel, doing set- up for this evening’s event—Teacher Leonard’s talk to the Novices’ Confluence, an introductory retreat. And Sally shall use water from the well. Shanti Jennifer told her so; during this month of intensive service, testing, meditation, what Shanti Jennifer says to Sally, goes.

One hundred percent voluntarily, of course.

When Sally pledged herself to a thirty-day Deep Retreat, she placed herself in the hands of Shanti Jennifer and of Leonard’s First Student, Fiona—the tall sleek Scot who oversees his food, his wardrobe, the meticulous recording of his words, the weekly testing of the well. Sally’d rather be arranging flowers and honey-colored candles on the Teaching platform, but that task belongs to Frederick. Her job’s to fill the water pitcher, to polish the hardwood floor and set out sixty cushions. She’s on her knees, pushing the floor-rag in great arcs. If this is not the work the gray-man meant for her to do, maybe the Community will give her what she needs for… whatever he had in mind. Come the time. Surely that’s enough.

More than enough if—oh, but will he?—Teacher Leonard chooses tonight to give

the new-comers a taste of Energy-Body Meditation. Sally too will be there. She’s got
her mental fingers crossed. She sweats a little as she buffs the shining boards. Sally already knows the EB Mediation techniques by heart: the sitting still, the focusing, the rigidly particular rhythms into which the breath must then be sent, the locking in of certain muscles, the willed opening of Self. But the subsequent jolt into another state of consciousness—surely it can be nothing else, that trembling more-than- genital release, that fleshly jerking and the simultaneous departure from the flesh—for Sally as for so many, this jolt comes only in Teacher’s presence. Comes only when he weaves his hands as his own teacher taught him years ago in India (before their seldom- mentioned rupture), and hoarsely whispers in some language she can’t name, and slaps one palm against the other.
Teacher is the catalyst. The synergist. The alchemist. The drug.

Not that drug’s a word that Sally uses. True, it crossed her mind once, when she first observed this electrifying practice. That day, she stayed still as possible in a roomful of Community members while Fiona sat cross-legged, eyes closed, to demonstrate, and Teacher wove his hands and slapped and whispered. His First Student broke into a seated dance of ecstasy, came back with wide-pupiled eyes, sweat-soaked. Drugs, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, hyper-ventilation—Sally thought of all those things. But then she tried it. She set those thoughts aside.

A ravishing fragrance slips into her nostrils. Up in the front alcove, tall lean Frederick chants beneath his breath. He steps back, regarding the frangipani just in from Honolulu. He turns to her and smiles benignly; he nods encouragement. Sally’s knees ache. Deep-Retreatants like herself do extra service after an

ordinary day of kitchen work or housekeeping; she’s bone tired. But (like the beavers
going to and from their lodge) she is immersed. Self is service, service, Self. What need to think of all that lies beyond her refuge here in Naniquaben? The main door to the Teaching Chapel creaks. Maya bounds inside.

“Sally!” she hisses. She shoots a look around the room. Shanti Jennifer has left. Frederick’s all attention. “Oh, oh, I’m—Frederick, Sally, he just gave me my Core Assignment! I know what I’m going to do for the next two years.” She shakes her head. Honey-colored ringlets bounce. A few tears spill onto her cheeks’ pink velveteen. “He’s sending me to India! To the One Citadel. Can you believe— I’ll do Temple Service Training and someday maybe I’ll teach here or out in California, or Majorca maybe. But first I do the Training.”
Frederick claps her on the shoulder. Maya’s voice breaks and she laughs again. “Oh you two dear Selves— I shouldn’t let my Crazy-Self— I know I’m handling this all wrong. But he says he’ll be going there soon, to the Citadel, and I can do Service for him maybe and…oh!” More tears ooze from luminous green eyes. She hugs Frederick, who gazes at her with half-hidden caution. She hugs Sally, stands on tiptoe, twirls. “Oh, I’ve got so much to do. I’ve got to scoot.” Yes, scoot she must. Shanti Jennifer and Fiona are strolling in to check the preparations. Maya exits swiftly through another door. Frederick turns back to the frangipani. Sally bends to her polishing. It makes her uneasy, that total giving-over on Maya’s part. “I really had to be like broken down,” she said to Sally just last night, in a whispered after-hours mention of her three weeks doing Attendant Service for Leonard back last spring. “Entirely. So he

could rebuild me as a true Self, you know. What I had to— Well, I had no idea.”
This is not the first time Sally has felt troubled here—only the first she’s let that emotion come fully forth. But soon it all gets left behind in the urgency of preparing the room for Teacher Leonard’s talk. Then there’s the rush to catch a bit of dinner, splash water on her face, change into white pants, white shirt. Next thing, she’s sitting in the back of the chilly Teaching Chapel, legs crossed, eyes closed, meditating. Drawing on a well of peace.
The whole room waits till Leonard steps in, sits, eventually begins to speak. As always, he is dressed in snowy linen, each spotless garment ironed to perfection. Tonight, his heavy silk-and-cashmere shawl is midnight blue. “To those among you who are willing,” he says and all eyes open, “I can give more than you know.”

93.

Contaminants creep into our waters: dirty crankcase oil or leaking diesel, unwanted
paint, pesticides that kill much more than bugs. Solvents from dry-cleaning clothes or
stripping furniture or cleansing printing presses. Bacteria in human waste and other
animals’. Mine residues or oil-shale tailings’. Carcinogens used by manufacturers with
household names, with attorneys who might pursue a mouthy novelist.
In the subterranean dark, groundwater carries accretions, illness, ruin. Poisons
seep through reservoirs. Wells are given up—if those who drink there know they should.
It isn’t only what we drink that’s altered. Effects fan out when water’s tainted.
Dominos go down. Look at the Chesapeake Bay, in glacial times the valley of a longer
Susquehanna. Nine major rivers bring to it what they cannot help but bring. Nitrates
from farms and lawns of the Appalachians slosh with others in the tides. Algae
populations bloom; aquatic plants are robbed of oxygen and light. Marsh-grasses, fish,
crustaceans, songbirds, waterfowl: their numbers plummet. Human livelihoods and
avian wintering grounds—both melt away.
But still we go to the waterways for what we need. Which is more than what we
drink. More than jobs and food. More than we recognize.
The fluid rush. The transport. Not some great spider’s work, yet a glittering,
inter-dependent net. A vital web, reflecting and refracting. Co-arising. Jeweled.

94.

Truly, it was one mighty unusual gang of folks I ran into at Naniquaben. Spa-guests and
heart-service workers and long-term Community members alike. Small wonder the rest of the world trickled right out of my mind. But I might have paid more attention to the real nature of the tiny world right there. I did notice early on that I had never in my life met half so many body-energy- therapy practitioners. Or so many young men—two—who preferred to wear long skirts. I do not mean the perfectly darling trans-gen lady rewarding herself with spa time after her final operation. I mean boys in skirts. Sometimes floral prints, and sometimes Indonesian patchwork, and more than once, I have to say, a little tatty.

Then there was Wilson, “homeless by choice,” born in the Reagan years and decked out in the same plaid Eisenhower-era sports coat every day. Nice as pie, Wilson, except he’d made a moral decision not to learn to drive, and therefore would not give directions to the nearest pharmacy or landromat. And Kiki, who believed we each had our own beautiful inner roadway to the realm of light, and who shushed me sharply, mouthing I AM IN PURE SI-LENCE, when I asked at lunch if she’d please pass the sesame-salt. And Alberta, who could drop the name of practically every spiritual teacher in the greater New York City area, except the Christian and Jewish ones. Sufis or Tibetans—all the same to her, seemed like. She’d given herself one more year: “It’s enlightenment or bust for me,” she said, like she was announcing her total commitment to

the Atkins diet.
Do not get me wrong. I wish them all the best of luck. But they did not call up my admiration. Give me Sister Amity at the Peace Pagoda—or even some of those cockamamie H.O.P.E.-fuls, blistering their feet for planetary mindfulness. Give me the few at Naniquaben who proved to be my true friends.

Wilson and the skirt-boys were drifters squatting down for a spell, Kiki and Alberta, spa-guests signed up for a week-long workshop. But some of the body-care specialists and yoga instructors—like Harper—stood in a different category altogether. They were not Students of Leonard like Shanti and Heidi and Malthus were. Teacher and Fiona did not pay them much mind, long as they did their jobs. I knew why they stuck around. It could be a real wonderful place, the Community. Like one afternoon when Harper taught the Middle-Stratum yoga class. We were flat on our backs in corpse pose, which is a name you hear so often, doing yoga, that it can come to mean about exactly nothing. “Be grateful,” she said, her vocal cords real loose, “for the body you have, and the level of health that lets you come here.” We breathed some more and she said, “Someday.” I lay there corpse-posed and got real clear on what she meant. For those moments, the idea did not scare or bother me one bit. Here’s what Frederick said once when we were scrubbing yams: why not live where your life is aimed at spiritual growth, instead of at buying yourself more toys?

The only folks I did not take some kind of liking to were pretty much the ones right next to Leonard. Not that I saw things that way at the time. Still, the snooty types like Fiona or flutter-eyed hulking Malthus began to rankle me as the days went by. Then

a whole big crew arrived for the winter—young men, mostly, from Liverpool and
Stockholm and Berlin. Theory-burgers, Frederick called them, and shook his head until his dreadlocks wobbled. They were already Students, and they knew that they knew more than ordinary folks, and they were ready to repurify the whole entire world. A new day comes. I started hearing that a lot more often after they showed up.
Also, Hard strife before Shambhala.

Heidi was all zealous and single-hearted too, and she grew up in the part of northern Virginia that could just as well be its own state and no complaints from me if it was. Same with Zack, a long-haired fellow whose accent shouted Alabama. He liked to say in Community Talk Time that he was “Doubtless. Doubtless!” when it came to Leonard’s Teachings. Especially after one of the young buzz-cuts snorted, “Oh yes, peace and love. Zat’s very fine. And so now we have for our world zis dreadful impure era.”

But I did not put all this together too awfully quick. In fact, I did not spend a whole lot of time using what Mama called the sense the good lord gave me—which I reckon is what Caledonia’s graduation requirements mean by “critical thinking skills.” Seems like all the commotions of the past six months, all my worries about Ess’s future, and the planet’s, and my own, had worn me out. Plumb worn me out, I said to Zack once, just to see if I could get him to smile a
down-home smile. “Y’all are doing clutter-talk, aspiring Self,” is what he replied. Well now, that tears it, bubba, I thought. When I gits my care package, y’all
don’t get no Moon-pie. But I told myself real quick to stop it, Sally Ellen—had I not
promised to plunge into nothing but the Teachings for a month? Did I not grasp that jokes

are dangerous ego-noise?
Besides, I had not eaten a Moon-pie in a good twenty years. Or wanted one, till after I drove north.

Then came the evening Leonard called me to speak up in front of the whole Community, plus the Novices’ Confluence people and a few spa-guests who’d been quietly invited to hear him Teach. This was maybe two days after Maya got her assignment to do Temple Training. She’d calmed down some but she was surely happy- happy still. Her step-dad had promised her airfare to India and her grandma was sending a big fat contribution to show Maya’s gratitude.

At dinner Maya told me all about her phone call to her grandma. This stirred up in me a fierce hankering to sneak a call to Ess and Val. Or even just one teeny tiny e- mail check. Hard to see how I could do it, though, what with the only internet hook-up being right in the Front Office and the phone booths in the lobby like they were. But shoot, I had emailed the kids about the silence policy the day I started my retreat. And I surely did need freedom from distractions if I was to hold on to my path. Was this urge to cheat not proof of that? Shanti Jennifer had warned me. Anyway, my month would be over in another couple weeks. Then, if I got accepted as a Junior Student, I would right away check my e-mail, and call them up to celebrate. Same plan if I was not accepted—the sound of my kids’ voices would cheer me considerably, a thing I’d surely need. Maya chattered right through dinner, her voice high and bright. I picked at my tempeh kebab and quinoa, dog-tired, hoping Shanti would not notice all this conversation—not strictly illegal, but not exactly proof I had my mind turned to the

Teachings. I’d been scrubbing bathrooms for heart-service, plus set-up and clean-afters
for Confluence sessions. I knew I should feel pleased so many Novices seemed ready to sign up for Home-Study Membership. But mostly I wanted just to sit and eat, alone. Maya leaned in close. “Go talk to him, Sally-Self. Get a private consultation.” She flushed. “He’ll know what you need.” I ducked my head and chased the slippery tempeh with my plastic chopsticks. “Maybe this aspiring Self is not ready yet.” “Oh, Sally.” She sighed. “Sometimes people have to stop thinking and— There’s, like, another thing. Say someone was hinting around that someone else is doing spiritual voyeurism? Wouldn’t that someone else be smart to prove she’s not the type to like, judge and question and all? Wouldn’t she be smart to get some sign of Teacher’s support?”
“Hold up there, Maya. Who—”
She pushed her chair back. “Gotta run, sweet Self. I’m just saying— Look, it makes sense to do what’s good for you and shows you really aren’t some ego-wallowing free-thinker Crazy-Self who could damage the whole Community with, you know, dissent. New day coming, right? And rumors don’t have to be true to hurt somebody’s
reputation.” She smirked, tossing her hair, sticking out her perfect breasts. “Hey, we learned that in high school, didn’t we?” With that, she left, practically running. I stared at my plate: words ran round its edge, same as on all plates in the Community, saying TO WILL ONE THING IS PURITY OF HEART IS TO WILL… and so on. But what if someone started willing something
different?

That was not single-hearted thinking. I hustled my tray to the turn-in window. If
I hurried, I could shower before I needed to get myself a seat in the Community Chapel. We’d heard about an hour ago that Teaching would not begin till seven-thirty, instead of seven, so I had a dab of time for once. Funny how changes like that seemed normal: we were never sure when events would start because each day’s schedule might get tweaked, depending on Leonard’s insights. Once, he dismissed us ten minutes into an all-afternoon Teaching session, told us to go to the Dining Chapel for coffee—they brew it real strong in the Community— and talk about what it means, to be one-pointedly committed. “Come back in two hours,” he said. “You might be ready then.” Kept our attention where he thought it ought to be, I guess. Kept us listening for him to say which way to jump. But no way anyone, let alone me, would waltz in late. I’d seen that happen exactly once, back when the Novices were invited to their first big Teaching in the Community Chapel. A skinny Irish-looking girl who ate mostly avocados tried to sneak in after Leonard started talking. He broke off mid-word, following every pitiful inchworm move the poor child made, drumming his fingers on his knee. No one breathed. Until he started to laugh the way a beagle bugles, then shouted, “Teacher does get perturbed when some Crazy does a naughty, doesn’t he, dear Selves?” We all about laughed ourselves sick. But I did not see the avocado girl again. Anyway, the shower gave me space to nail down what Maya meant. Someone had been spreading dirt on me.
Someone disliked me enough to want to do that. Someone was out for payback, maybe, thinking I had made him look a fool, or

pulled him down in the pecking order.
I reckoned Someone’s name was Malthus.
I got to the Teaching Chapel too late to get a seat up front and show pure aspiration. But I managed to nab a cushion at the end of a row—sometimes in the Community everyone just crowded in too close for me. Even three-quarters full, the room was hushed, like always. Candles shone round the Teaching platform. Frederick had outdone himself with pale purple orchids and twisty bittersweet. How could Leonard be anything but good, I asked myself, when an artist like gentle Frederick and warm-hearted innocents like Maya followed him? I closed my eyes. I set my mind on breathing. By this time even the Novices had got the hang of meditation. The room filled with an energy that you will only understand if you have felt it. Closest I had come before was times like up on Alander Mountain. Or at the foot of Mount Monadnock. Or staring at Bash Bish Falls. Be here, I told myself. So I set to noticing my little worries bobbing up and down
inside my head, and the sounds of other people tiptoeing in, and the itch on my leg until that dropped away. Noticing and letting go. I knew all those things were equal, in the end. I believe I do not need to say again how good that part of the Teachings is. Leonard joined us. He always used a special door directly from his Residence, and his regulated padding walk I knew by heart. We all sat maybe half an hour longer, eyes still closed.
“Ave, Selves,” he said.
When we looked, he was shaking his head. “You poor skeletons are so screwed up,” he bellowed. That great big laugh-with-me laugh of his rang out, then all at once his

voice went tender. “You poor ignorant skeletons.”
Of course we did laugh with him. Stupid stupid us! He knew what we were— goony idealists, klutzy do-gooders, gutless seekers. That meant, he had the obligation to point out, we were ineffectual dolts. (“Listen to Leonard!” Zack shouted out at that point, and a couple people tittered. Teacher’s half-frown shut them up real quick.) Our home planet was filthy and getting filthier, Leonard continued placidly, the governments were feeding troughs run by corporate swine, and we, we had decided to sit and meditate and maybe try to put our eentsy-weensy band-aids of sappy loving-kindness and warmed-over twentieth-century-style social action on gigantic pus-filled wounds! Peace ‘n’ love ‘n’ cosmic vibes, oh yeah. Yes, yes, those very things had brought us to him—he knew that. We’d liked it when he talked about them. But hadn’t we come here to grow with him? Why weren’t we willing to help bring the new day nearer, now that it was barreling down the track right toward us, its single headlight blazing, breathing steam? Given his burden (not easy, the responsibility of seeing all things from the perspective of the One, hadn’t he touched on that this morning?), couldn’t we go along with him a little farther? Did we really like it so very much, all our doubting, our being logic-crazy, our asking questions and considering all the time? Evidence? Wasn’t he right there before us, and was that not
enough?
He kept on that way, sometimes a sad mama scolding, sometimes the handsomest most charming daddy there ever was. I had never heard him sound so much like the buzz-cut boys, though—as if his teaching came from what they said, as if he needed them and not the other way around. It bothered me that he was all of the sudden putting down

the meditation I thought the whole Community was built on.
But I would think about that later. Right now, surely, listening to Leonard was the thing to do.
How we roared with laughter when he cocked an eyebrow. Yet I snuck a glance around and saw that Maya was crying while she laughed. Her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth twisted open. If you saw a photo you might think she was shrieking. And she was not the only one. Leonard asked who wanted to tell what they had figured out from discussing that morning’s Teachings. Hands flew up all round the room. This was my chance. I had not tried before to speak at times like this—I guess maybe that is one thing Malthus was pointing out about me. Same as Emily Dickinson, I am not the testifying type. Seemed unladylike to jabber on when I knew already what I thought and could learn more from hearing others. But if I said I got it now, what Teacher told us this morning about the pointlessness of so-called compassion in the face of mass environmental destruction—well, that might earn his notice. He might call me forward, tell me to see First Student Fiona and set up a personal consultation. That would fix Malthus’s little red wagon, guaranteed. Just then I spotted Harper. It was not but yesterday when we were walking to our bunkroom and I asked how hard it was to get to fully devoted single-heartedness, that she had turned to me and said, “No shit, kiddo, he didn’t used to rap like he’s been rapping lately.” When I asked her what she meant, she clammed right up. Now she had that same clammed-up look—lips set tight, eyes downward. Still, I had committed myself to giving all this a try. I could not truly see how compassion and loving-kindness are a waste, but what harm in saying a few agreeable

words, knocking that Malthus off his high horse, maybe getting a speck closer to a real
remarkable man? My hand floated up.
He looked right at me. His head froze in mid-nod. Well, I can tell you that in the next instant pretty nearly the whole room turned my way. Teacher stared like I had done something (I did not know what, but something) no civilized person would ever do. Which did not make a lot of sense. All kinds of folks had been reaching their hands up high—social workers, art therapists, body-work people, the one real sad-seeming M.D. that Leonard liked to pick at, those underemployed European fellows and U.S. drop-out types, the twitchy retired dot-com CEO. Choose me, Teacher, oh please choose me.
Then I realized they were not gawking at me, exactly, but at someone right behind me. I felt a warm hand on my shoulder blade. I turned to see who it could be.

95.

The population density in the Teaching Chapel of the Naniquaben Community is at the
present moment problematic. Especially for Sally Paradiso, who finds herself in the center of a sudden knot of scowling humans: over-grown Malthus and brawny Fiona and a gaggle of angry eco-skinhead devotees, bumping close. Also, Ess. Bright-eyed, courageous, slightly worried-looking Ess. Still standing half behind and half beside her mother, still resting one hand on her mother’s upper back, still shyly proud to be who she’s deciding that she is. Shanti Jennifer glides over. “Just who are you, young lady,” she inquires, “and what, I beg to ask, brings you to burst in on us in this so-unseemly fashion?” Ess lifts her chin and explains that she has come to see her mother. To take her home, right now. “Maah,” she says. “Oh, Maah—” Sally has twisted round to see her daughter. Now she draws in air. But still she cannot push it outward in the form of words. “If you mean this member of our Community,” says slack-bellied Malthus, twitching his hand in the direction of the compact woman sitting at his feet, “this is her chosen home.” He looks from Sally’s lavish hair to close-cropped Ess, covertly assessing the DNA connection, showily questioning the desirability of a would-be student who brings such disruption in her wake. “For now.” “I-need-to-speak-to-my-daughter,” Sally blurts. Still stuck to her mat like a tree

to its roots, she bows her head in the direction of Teacher Leonard, though she can’t see
him for the wall of legs before her. “Excuse us, please.” Grabbing the younger woman’s hand, she pulls her closer. “Sara Esperanza,” Sally whispers, “you know I am always one-hundred-percent glad to see you. But whatever I did to embarrass you in middle school was nothing, next to this. Now what is going on?” “Family emergency,” Ess says loud enough for all the room to hear. “Val and I phoned the office here yesterday. They said you didn’t want to talk to us.” Sally’s face transforms. “Oh, punkin,” she says, standing up. “I truly did not know you called. Are you all ri—”
“Stop the chatter, aspiring Self,” Malthus commands in the grim tones of the unstoppable. “We are listening to Teacher Leonard. You asked this Community to be your family. But we do not, I think, need discord among us.” “Bloody right,” the thickly tattooed woman beside him says. “Dissension is toxin, right? In times like these.”
“She’ll aye be staying on,” Fiona cuts in, “a wee bit longer. She and this lass will no doot be wishing to clear things up wi’ Teacher and” she nods in the direction of the row of spa-guests invited in for this evening’s teachings, “—and wi’ our new friends and a’.” She tousles Sally’s hair, as if playfully, as if the two of them shared innocuous secrets that would explain away this tension, perhaps as a bit of theater leading to an illuminating Teaching, should the audience be willing to relax. “Ah,” says Malthus, touching his soul patch thoughtfully. “Ah, yes.” He turns to look directly at the Novices. “New friends in my discussion group, this aspiring Self will, I am certain, join us tomorrow morning, and she will, I am certain, make a nice

apology for having so weak a heart-focus and—”
“For this wee interruption,” Fiona states with finality. “Noo we maun gie a thocht to what Teacher has telt us concerning true families, and false.” She spins round to face the platform in its alcove. She inclines her head. Leonard waves an airy blessing: too trivial for me to hassle with, his gesture says.
“Sit doon, sit doon, my guid Sally-Sel,” Fiona continues, voice bland as porridge although anyone close enough can see she’s steaming like a haggis. “Dinna fash yersel. We winna blame you for an ill-trickit bairn’s…impetuosity. And you, lassie. You’ve made a right habble here, but if you’ll gang noo to the lobby and sit at peace—Malthus and Johnny and Bas, yous’ll keep this glaiket lassie company?—then perhaps our sister Sally will consent to talk wi’ you when tonight’s Teaching is done. You widna hash about so in a kirk, would you, lassie, havering like a header and causing such a fankle?” She sets one arm akimbo on her hip. “Or in a synagogue or mosque,” she adds with haste. “Or temple.”
This stagy barrage serves her purpose. Foreheads furl. Much of the audience has been thoroughly distracted from Ess’s announcement that the office refused yesterday’s desperate phone call from her and Val.
Meanwhile, Shanti Jennifer has been attempting to draw Ess quietly aside. Ess doesn’t budge. Her hair’s grown out a bit; jaw set the way her father’s sets, she resembles a girlish Julius Caesar. “Maah—” she says again. “I’m fine. Val, too. But, I’m sorry, this is huge.”
“Sweetpea…” says Sally, just as Fiona hisses, “Wheesht noo! Shut your gub!” But Ess will not shut up, not Ess. “Maah, just step outside with me a sec, okay?

We need to talk.”
“My gosh, Sally!” Shanti Jennifer’s voice is quiet, but its overlay of India has vanished; now it’s pure Wisconsin twang. “Boy oh boy, if you go out there… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“If she steps out—” Leonard’s sonorous voice yanks all eyes in his direction. “If she steps out, she needn’t return.”
“If she steps out,” mutters Malthus to those standing close, “we’re stepping, too.” “She is detrimental to ze community,” another voice chimes in. “She denigrates us.”
Sally disregards them both. Disregards the soft-necked teacher on his flowery, candlelit dias. Disregards Shanti Jennifer’s look of shock and Fiona’s covert handflick- order: don’t you dare. She moves fast, decided now, afire with love and anger. And more than a little fear.
Throwing one arm around her daughter, Sally Paradiso murmurs, “Honey, I surely do hope this is real important. Now let’s get going.” Get going they do, Ess and Sally side by side. But a posse of three tall men walks close behind them. A fourth, trailed by a smaller figure, slips through the back-row dimness to bring up the rear. All this worries Sally, but she refuses to glance back. In the highly-polished lobby, Ess—ignoring the five bystanders and staring directly into her mother’s eyes—tells Sally that Dickie’s had a myocardial infarction. “That’s a mild, like, heart-thing, Maah. You know. Yesterday afternoon. But I talked to Val a couple hours ago, he flew into Alloway this morning, and the heart doc thinks it’s looking not too bad. They’ll know more tomorrow. Pops has had like a million tests.”

Sally stops short. A heart attack. Oh, Dickie. Oh poor Ess. Poor Val.
Her daughter links one arm through hers. He’s out of intensive care, Ess says, but still in Alloway Memorial, which is where she and Sally are about to go. Right now. The two start moving once again, trailed by their unspeaking retinue. “Right. The hospital.” Sally propels herself past the old inn’s heavy door. Ess steers her toward the gleaming PT Cruiser that sits, engine running, at the foot of the stairs. This has got to be a dream, she thinks. A heart attack? And Malthus and those hooligans still behind us, fit to be tied? And, blessed be, do I not recognize this car? Blessed Be is what its very bumper sticker says. The square-shouldered woman in
the driver’s seat waves encouragement. Sure, and it’s no one but Peg Beaulieu. Proud Mary’s door swings open. Phebe Rigopoulos hops out to help Ess bundle Sally in. “Hey—” shouts Malthus just as Peg says, “Good to see ya, Sally. Sorry bout the bad news bout ya ex.”
“We were starting to wonder if the Lennies had grabbed Miz Esperanza here,” says Phebe as she slams the door, adding cheerily, “That’s one kickin’ girl ya raised.” Malthus takes loud exception to this further intrusion. What right have strangers to invade the World Repurification Order HQ? One of his posse seizes the Cruiser’s door handle.
“Hit it, Peg-o,” Phebe cries. Peg floors the pedal. The Cruiser stalls.
Harper and Frederick step forward—one small and certain, one long-limbed— past the other three. “Teacher says,” states Harper sharply, “Crazy is as Crazy does. Know what I mean?”

Malthus’s hand drops. His eyebrows pucker. The two beside him blank out,
gnawing automatically on this pemmican-shred of orthodoxy. But Frederick nods, his face a mask of reverence. “Right,” he drawls. “No choice for them but their Crazy-path, so off they go. Listen to Leonard, boys.” Thus do peaceable Frederick and world-wise Harper engage the explosive three in contemplation of Teachings concerning personal responsibility and the collective will. Proud Mary negotiates the bumpy lane down to the bunkhouses. The posse of true believers turns back toward the door of the inn, where Fiona stands. Meanwhile, in a whisper, Harper tells Frederick about the time a Texas boot appeared, locked on the rear wheel of a Junior Student who wanted to slip away from Fiona’s wrath. Eleven minutes later, mother and daughter are ready to be dropped off at the red Toyota pick-up in the residents’ parking lot. But shadowy figures stand guard beside the Yo-truck.
Ice wraps Sally’s throat.
No, the posse’s gone inside: out-argued or befuddled. Fiona has vanished, too. Frederick and Harper decided to keep watch on the truck. Quick hugs. Quick reassurances. A suitcase and a lumpy backpack and a laundry bag fly into the truck. Peg offers Frederick and Harper rides to anywhere they want to go. Both of them shrug and laugh—no, no, they’ll be taking part in some major Community Conversations, no doubt of that, but they’ll be fine. “I’ve got plans anyway,” says Frederick coolly, then flashes his two-million dollar grin. “Time for you to haul-A, kiddos,” Harper says. “And Sally—Lennie’s full of shit these days. But some of the Teaching’s still pure gold. Remember to breathe. Now go.”

Sally locks the Toyota’s camper top. Proud Mary steams off toward Lowell,
bearing Peg and Phebe. Frederick and Harper wave. Sally, half-dazed, waves back, and blows two kisses. The Yo-truck starts a rapid journey south. “…that part was easy, sweet Maah,” Ess is saying now, as she peers into the headlights’ sweep, adjusts the steering wheel. “When Medicine Man and I decided I’d best come haul you home, I got their phone number in Lowell. Once we remembered Peg’s last name it took like half a minute.” She pulls into the passing lane. “So I told them I was flying into Logan, major crisis, and would they be willing to give a sweet young dyke a lift so she could save her mom from—Really, are those people an actual cult, or is that dude just seriously out of control?” Sally shakes her head. She could mean either No, they’re not or No, he isn’t. Or possibly, What on this green earth have I been doing? “No offense, Maah. I’m like totally coffee’d up. And the last twenty-four hours have been beyond rough.” Ess pats her mother’s knee. “Hey, no blame. I was cool with what you were into, word. Least until Val started checking out this Leonard on the net. And I do get it about no cell phone. You know those towers like wreck migrating birds? Messes up their direction-finder deal?” She exhales sharply. The small truck surges forward, engine running at its upper limit. “But, knock-knock, no calls at all, plus forbidding e-mail? Did that not, excuse me, tip you off?”
Once more, Sally shakes her head. A silence fills the cab. But so much of it, she thinks, was good. She sighs. Or, better than an ordinary life. “They won’t buy from SupaPharma,” she says softly. And then: “It is not like it’s

a prison.”
Ess drums the steering wheel.
Some hours later, as they swoop westward across the Taconics toward the Delaware water-gap, the Poconos, and Scranton, they pass a wonder in the interstate’s wide brushy median. Ess snores small delicate snores, leaning against the cab’s far door, wrapped in her mother’s sleeping bag. The window on Sally’s side blasts cold November air. She thinks of Dickie—his hands, his steady voice, his lost youthful body, the new white in his hair—and of nothing else in Alloway, save Val. Except: one wincing mental glimpse of Arjay looming above her like a demon- embodiment of all that kept her stitched tight within the conventions of her former life. The radio sputters, static-y and unnoticed. Arjay, she realizes in a foggy flash, is part of what she’s going back for. Whatever it is she’s meant to do, whatever else the gray-man spoke of, it has to do with bulky, scary Arjay. But can she stand up to him? No chance Sally will fall asleep at the wheel now. Her heart begins to smolder like a pile of burning tires.
Her eyes flick to the median: wide, lightly wooded, illumined by onrushing lights. What she sees is no more than a slice of water, the silhouette of an oddly regular heap of sticks. Still, she knows: a beaver lodge, built in a downfold of land between the two unyielding strips of Interstate 87. Their pond created for them by this four-lane disruption of the watercourse. A food supply at hand—enough for now, at least. The predatory traffic rushing by.
And waiting for her in Alloway, a task, some task, that she will simply have to find the will to do. The gumption.

96.

Red chains of taillights pulling us south, Ess and I rolled through the Pennsylvania night.
We could not bear to think too much of Dickie, so my half-surly altogether-exhausted child and I kept breaking into conversation, breaking off. We said how worried we were about her daddy. The tension did not go away. Disapproval hung between us in the cab, double-edged, like each of us was thinking: How could you do that dumb stuff you did? Did you not care how it might hit me me me?
Naniquaben started looking different, I have to say, soon as I got outside it. When headlights burned in the Yo-truck’s rearview mirror, I saw the banks of hand-dipped candles, the harsh porch light of the inn. Ess had been hotheaded and hot-blooded. But had I been an almighty fool?

She started telling me some interesting facts. Like how some reporter found out Leonard had four kids by three different women—none of whom receives much child support. Also, he is not the orphaned son of Episcopalian missionaries to India, but the only child of a big-time Austrian-born research chemist (certain profit-building industrial effluents a specialty) with two Ph.D.’s. Leonard himself flunked out of Yale his sophomore year. The talk about honorary degrees was pure bull-twinkies. I tried not to notice how smug my daughter sounded, especially whenever she said “bogus,” which a tad was more often than I felt she needed to. It was true that Leonard studied in India. But I still do not know if he really had

the experience Fiona called his Transcendentalization. Remembering how it felt to do
Energy-Body Meditation with him in the room to guide us, I figure maybe he did. But these days, no one can tell me that transcending is what it is truly all about. Or that it improves somebody’s character to be the object of so much adulation—look at what happened to Elvis near the end.
I did not get into that with Ess. We had both been through a lot since she left Alloway. Then, as we sailed past Harrisburg, I offered her a joke, just trying to lighten the air: “Remember what Rhett Butler said, sweetpea—the Yankees I met were pretty much like Southerners, but they surely did have terrible accents and worse manners.” “Maah! That book glorifies a culture built on the worst exploitation.” Her voice whined at me with the vowels of TV-speak. “It’s effing racist, Maah. What would your friend Frederick think to hear you quoting it?” I did not inform her I’d noticed that myself. Did not say, watch your mouth, or suggest she get her hind end back in school and write a paper on Margaret Mitchell as investigator of human suffering and its causes. Did not point out the novel glorifies other things too, like being tough when life is. That it makes it real clear war is a mighty dumb idea—and weren’t we all needing to think about that just now, with all the Get Saddam- talk coming on so strong?
Also, I did not tell her this: one Halloween in his Vassar days, Frederick wore calico and a do-rag and (he’d told me, grinning) ran around shrieking that he did not know nuffin about birthin babies, although I am not entirely certain what point he was making, exactly. But that book, plus his brains, had given him a way to make it. What I did was pull my mind away from what-all awaited us in Alloway and

move on to other topics. Like the time I saw Leonard in the garden and gathered my
courage and said, “Good morning, Teacher, how are you?” and he looked at me funny and said “How am I?” Or the day I overheard a Novice asking Shanti Jennifer if First Student Fiona was Teacher’s girlfriend. “No!” snapped Shanti. I kept piling dirty coffee cups on my tray, careful not to clink. When the Novice asked, was Teacher Leonard celibate, Shanti said, “Enough clutter-ing, small Self. Time to watch the First Teachings video.” She shoved it in the VCR real quick. Ess laughed out loud at that. But I had not thought it funny till she did. Stories got us down the road, although I did not much care for how Ess snorted after some of them. Still, Dickie kept resurfacing in the silences—I worried half about his health and half about how, soon as he was up to it, we were going to have to get ourselves one of those divorce-mediators so we did not hand a bushel of money to the lawyers. Also another half about that tire-dump fire, if you will excuse my arithmetic. I will tell you here and now—that is three halves the like of which I do not wish ever to jostle round inside my head again. But they did keep me from sorrowing over leaving a place where I saw a lot of good people honestly trying to live out an ideal. And it would not be long at all until a clarity that had sprouted in me, right out of the pond-muck of the Community’s defects, would pay off big-time. For now, though, I kept fiddling with the window and the heater, like if I got the temperature just perfect, the man I’d married in the spring of my nineteenth year would survive his heart attack unharmed.
Moving through the darkness, I got Ess to go over the whole entire dealie with the nuke waste site. After that, I said she’d done me proud. Like Henry Thoreau sitting in

the Concord jailhouse, I told her, instead of supporting a bad war and slavery.
“You’ve read Thoreau, Maah?” she said. “Henry the Bodhisattva?” And then, “Yo, right. Of course. I like just discovered him last month.” Ess shot me a look in the dim-lit cab. “Guess I’ve been a little out to lunch.” She started crying then. I teared up too. This did not strike me as the wisest thing, not at seventy-one miles an hour, the Yo-truck’s absolute max. So I squeezed her hand and asked her quick what music she was listening to these days. “Mos Def,” she said. She chanted about cool wells, about how people were hanging from the night like green leaves.
Words about yearning for a better world—right out of a hip-hop song full of despair and drinking and who knows what-all. I came back at her with a little Dickinson, the end of a poem about trying to imagine heaven where she says Maybe—“Eden” a’n’t so lonesome As New England used to be.
“Missed you, punkin,” I said, and Ess said, “Yo.” That started to put us back where we should be with one another. Those borrowed words were our roundabout way, seemed like, of saying we each of us understood what the other one had been going for and why, even if we did both think the other tended to get a tad extreme. If only, I thought, her daddy and I could have a chance to say the same.
We stopped at a gas station that advertised its concern for the environment with a logo of a leafy sun. Ess reached in her pocket, pulled out a green wooden something—a man in a sombrero, looked like, his arms upraised. “Meet Señor Saguaro,” she said. “He got me through the jail thing. Maybe you should carry him for now, sweet Maah.” I squinted in the filling station’s all-night glare. “He’s a cactus?” Hollows

rimmed his eyes. The line of his lips ran straight. Except for his hat, he was dark dark
green.
“What, you’re going species-ist on me now, Maah? Señor Saguaro’s a green giant of munificence, a wild man who like refuses to be endangered. Yes, he is a cactus. I love him big time. Put him in your pocket before I take him back.” I did. If she said so, I told my daughter, then a good-luck cactus is what he was. I put my arms around her and right there on the oil-stained pavement outside the grotty ladies’ room, we both cried till you could not say who was forgiving, who was comforting, who.
Just before sunrise, I found out the child had not eaten a bite in the last day and a half except some chocolate-covered soy nuts. We pulled into a truck-stop and called Val on his new cell phone, catching him in the hospital lobby, where he’d gone to stretch his legs. No news, except that Dickie had slept fine. Val would try to get an up-date from the cardiologist when he made his rounds. “The event was apparently mild,” my son assured me with a voice-wobble so tiny only I would hear it. “I’m predicting a diagnosis of sub-enocardial M.I.” I said that sounded real good, thanks, sweetie, but what exactly did it mean? “Mild,” he told me, adding that he thought Dickie would be out of the hospital in a few more days, possibly back to work within a month. “A lot depends on the extent of the damage, Mom—but if the tests show us it was non-Q…the mild kind, then the risk of…further danger is significantly reduced.” He paused. “Thank god,” he said, wobbly again. I wanted to reach through that sputtering pay phone and hug him like he was a toddler waking up from a bad dream.

But I did not have such an opportunity for a few hours more. I still do not like to
imagine what we looked like, Ess and I, charging through the halls of Alloway Memorial, me in my loose white pants that looked like pajamas by that point, with a thrift-store sweater and Dickie’s big old rain jacket on for warmth, and her in the same baggy cargoes and zip-up Hello Kitty hoodie that she’d been wearing for over thirty-six hours. Probably a whole lot longer, since she’d been just getting off work at the coffee house when the call from Shaunna came.
Yes, Shaunna. Come to find out, she’d been mentioned more than once when Ess and Val talked with their father in the past few weeks. So my children were not entirely surprised to learn that the former office manager of Paradiso Brothers’ Contracting was now close enough to Dickie to be the one who called 911, and then his family. Not as surprised as I was, that is a certainty. What other things, I wondered, had I missed while I was taking refuge on the road?

97.

Sally Paradiso sits beside a bank of monitors beside her sleeping, practically-ex husband.
Who would be practically-ex, period, had his blocked artery been a major one, had Shaunna Robillard not insisted he take his symptoms seriously, had the doctors not won out over his genetic set-up and a lifetime of anger choked inside. Sally gazes through the window to the brick wall of Alloway Memorial’s oldest wing, an alley’s width away. She looks back at his neat new beard.

A beard on Dickie! How else has he changed? Just how close is he to that Shaunna? What other secret sides of him did she not see?

Her chest heaves and falls. She and Dickie talked a little, right after her arrival an hour or so ago. “Aw, Sally, I’ll be fine,” he said, weak but stubborn as ever. “I tole you, doctor said the first test results are good, and we got no call to be looking out for anything different from the others. It’s a shame you-all had to come rushing back.” He glanced over at Ess and Val then, hovering near the doorway. “Not that I’m not real pleased by all the,” he swallowed hard and dry, “concern.” Sally sent the kids off to the house, to clean themselves up and get some rest. “I’ll catch a nap this afternoon,” she told them. “But there is no way I can sleep right now.” They swapped a look, then left her alone with him. Dickie reached for her hand, but would not meet her eye. In minutes, he fell asleep again.

She eases her hand free. He doesn’t move. “I am surely glad you did not die,”

she whispers, “you stinker.” But what, she won’t say even when he’s sleeping, what is
she now to do? Turn in this man, whose flesh made with hers the flesh of their two children—tell the police he might be the one who set the tire dump on fire? Is that the work the gray-man wants her to undertake? Is that the good that’s meant to come of her new courage, of her wondrous, doofus-y time out on the road? Sally shakes her head. She and Dickie have spoken nothing of the tire dump. Nor has anyone exhaled the word divorce, although clearly they both want it. As for the return of Shaunna to Dickie’s life, she’s still staring at the bricks and contemplating that one when a huge bouquet of chrysanthemums walks in the door. The legs of the bouquet, its hips, tell all: her sister-in-law Juanita. “Sally!” she whisper-shrieks. “You poor baby! Is he—?” Her estrogen-smoothed face with its cryogenic Big Hair peers around the burst of blossoms in Virginia Tech maroon-and-orange. She sizes up snoozing Dickie, nods. “Val said he was doing right good. He tell you Arjay and me was there first thing to see him in the icy-ewe, but they almost would not let us in? Arjay had to raise some Cain.” She shakes her head and Sally’s mesmerized by the silky fullness of her hair. “Oh, honey,” Juanita breathes, “show me where to put these things and let me give you a hug.”
Her warm squeeze comforts Sally. Juanita has switched from Shalimar to My Sin. She was matron of honor at Sally’s wedding. They’ve had moments, over the years, of real communication about the Paradiso brothers such as neither could have had with anybody else. What’s more, Juanita’s heart is equal in softness to her brain and bottom. Sally values that quality all the more now that she’s seen the steely gleam at the core of

sanctified believers like Malthus and Fiona and their ilk.
A nurse breezes in to waken Dickie for a sponge bath, and everyone pretends to believe that Arjay really did tell Juanita to say he sent his love. The two women head off for the cafeteria, leaving the nurse to carry out his job. “Do us both good to sit and visit a spell,” says Juanita, beaming. “Dickie, you take care, hear? Your big brother will be in to see you soon. Chelsi too, someday after school.” Dickie nods. If she’s going to leave Dickie, Sally would prefer a shower. She counts the hours since her last one, realizes it’s still far fewer than twenty-four. Entering the cafeteria’s timeless fluorescent plastic-philodendron zone, she counts again: amazing. She and Juanita settle in a corner with their coffee and a couple stale glazed doughnuts. It is surprisingly good to talk. At least with Juanita, Sally doesn’t feel she has to be a pillar of mom-strength. At least with Juanita, she can utter the word “divorce”—and Juanita simply nods. Neither of them, however, says anything like “Shaunna” or “girlfriend” or “barely thirty-five years old.” The second time Arjay’s name comes up, Juanita cracks. “Sally,” she says, suddenly unsteady, “I want you to know he feels real bad about what-all happened the day Dickie…took sick. I hope you will be telling Dickie that. I still believe Arjay just cannot help but lose his temper sometimes—it was their daddy made him that way, you know that. The man is always terrible sorry, after.” Sally thinks of Arjay’s rages and her stomach queases. Juanita charges on, her last chunk of doughnut stopped halfway to her mouth. “I am worried about Arjay, Sally, and that is gospel. Even though I am about to—Well, excuse me. I will hold off on that part for now.” She slips into the quietest voice she’s got. “But he is acting awful

strange.”
After that, it doesn’t take much prodding. Sally learns that a] a few hours before Dickie’s heart attack, he and Arjay had a shouting match—Juanita has no idea what about, except it was something to do with who owns something, maybe a piece of land. And b) Juanita’s husband is going off Friday evening on a fishing trip, which anyone can see is a fabrication, because for one thing the man has never gone fishing in his life. Juanita accepts Sally’s wordless offer of half her doughnut. “Now I honestly do not mind,” she continues, “if Arjay is, excuse me if this bothers you, honey, cheating on me. Again. Even though he does not trouble himself to make up a decent lie. I used to pray on that one a whole lot and now I have found a new way to make my peace with it. But it does seem like that might not be what is going on.” She dabs at her lips, leans back, reassumes her habitual look of bland gaiety. “Well now, men! There is nothing we can do about them, is there, except let the good lord’s will be done, and work around them best as we can. The main thing is that you are going to be a divorcee and not a widow and I say that is better, all in all.” On that note of up-beat pragmatism, the two soon-to-be-ex sisters-in-law hug and part. Sally heads for the bank of elevators, presses the arrow that points heavenward. As she waits, a gurney rolls up beside her. The round-bellied gent atop it nods pleasantly, so Sally nods back. And then—sweet heaven!—a down-bound elevator opens its doors, revealing someone Sally knows. Too well. Hank. Hank Q. The man on the track of the tire dump fire. The man who keeps
pursuing her, wanting her to open up. A man she cannot possibly talk to now. He’s bending over his palm-top, frowning, fiddling with a stylus. This gives Sally

time to squat down fast, wishing a thousand blessings on the belly and the gurney that
shelter her from the reporter’s sight.
A truculent looking woman in a wheelchair creaks out of Hank’s elevator. He and two nursing aides wait their turn behind. With a tinny ping, an up-bound elevator arrives in front of Sally. The gurney lurches forward. Her only hope’s a duckwalk. So duckwalk Sally does, keeping pace with the trailing sheet that screens her, right into the elevator. The door whirrs shut and only then does she pop up to find herself nearly eye to inquisitive eye with the prostrate gent. “Beats Thighmaster,” she chirps. “Six, please.” The gurney-pusher obliges. A moment later, Sally steps into the small lounge on six. She pauses at its picture window, gazing through autumn-clarified air toward the indigo mountains, frozen mid-step in their long walk to the ocean. She remembers a book a spa-guest left at Naniquaben, words some Japanese Zen master wrote. Blue mountains are neither sentient nor insentient. You yourself are neither sentient nor insentient. Sally considers: maybe this makes enormous sense,
maybe none at all. If you don’t assess the mountains’ motion by what humans know of motion, he went on to say, you won’t have doubts about whether they move or not.
It’s a matter of time-scale, partly, her perception of mountains turned immobile in mid-stride; she gets this much for sure. They’re actually sliding seaward like a string of oms. As the doors of the elevator are sliding, now. Sally hardly registers the ping.
But it’s enough to fracture her reverie. She turns, ready to head back to Dickie’s room, then sees the round, dark, pretty, thirty-five year old woman stepping toward her. “Hello, Sally,” says Shaunna, shoulders back in her emerald-green suit. “Val told

me you’d be here. How you doing?”
Shaunna. Sally nods. She slumps into a saggy loveseat, then, remembering her
manners, pats the space beside her. “Thank you for calling 911,” she says. Twenty minutes later, a great deal has been said, some of it even spoken. Not put into words are key utterances like, on one side, You can have him, really, for all I care, and on the other, Well, looks like I have already got him and Some time I might apologize for taking up with him back when…but he said you-all were only sticking together
because no one wanted to be saying you had come unstuck.
What Sally gets out loud are the details of the 911 call and the ER. She learns along the way that Dickie has gotten comfortable in Shaunna’s apartment in a more-or- less integrated neighborhood near downtown Alloway. But they are talking of a move to Arlington, where her uncle’s a contractor and Dickie could get good work—if only Arjay would buy him out of Paradiso Brothers, Inc., giving him funds for the transition. Which Arjay refused to do, a mere hour before Dickie’s heart seized up. “Richard will be staying in-state,” says Shaunna, “till you two have finished with your business. You don’t need to be thinking he will cut and run. But in January, I begin grad school in D.C., with him or without.” Her smile is fixed; her clear eyes ask for understanding. “A clean start looks to be the best thing for us all.” Sweet Jeez, thinks Sally, that is a whole lot of pills to swallow. Too many for her
to think of now. Instead, she says Juanita mentioned the shouting match the brothers had two days ago. What does Shaunna know about it? This is how Sally learns that Dickie doesn’t really own the land the tire dump’s on—or, did co-own it, but only until Arjay realized that in setting up the chain of

machinations to make it seem B. Calloway held title, he could give himself a small
reward. A reward for being the older brother, or for not being naïve about the way a real businessman does business, or for being smart enough to look out for Number One. The land is and has been for years now, in point of legal fact, all his. Sally jams her hands into her pockets, the pockets of the jacket that sheltered her on Bash Bish Mountain. Her fingers encounter the nubby wooden body of Señor Saguaro. She holds him tight, so tight the brim of his sombrero dents her palm. She nods at Shaunna, suddenly too giddy to speak. Is this cactus sentient or insentient? What about Shaunna, Dickie, the loveseat, that ficus-tree by the window, Tolliver Creek? What about herself? Are they many things, or one, or…something else? “I am telling you this,” says Shaunna, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, “because I am done with lies and hiding. But Richard says he will not bring it up with his brother ever again.” She turns to face Sally full on. “It’s no big thing that I kept copies of those papers Arjay’s lawyer wrote up, back when. I only did what’s right. Partly, I was looking out for Mister Calloway. Guess you heard he passed last week?” No, Sally had not heard. Relief cascades through her body like Bash Bish Falls. Oh, she feels sad too: a man has died. But she did not know the weight of the moral burden she’d been carrying. Did not allow herself to know. Later, she’ll try to put herself in Shaunna’s head at the time the land-title flim- flam was being set up. She’ll imagine sleeping with—be fair, Sally Ellen: being in love with—one boss, while watching the other cheat his brother, plus make casual use of poor
cantankerous whiskey-addled B. Calloway, plus assume the woman running the copier is too dumb to notice anything. Then she’ll imagine The Clueless Wife dropping by the

office. No wonder Shaunna always struck her as reserved.
But for now, Sally orders herself to concentrate on Shaunna’s recent commendable straightforwardness. The husband-hunting wench. Scratch that. Sally decides that someday she’ll do a meditation practice Harper
taught. She’ll surround Shaunna and Dickie—locked-down jaw and rebel beard and wandering pecker and all—with a golden glow of loving-kindness. No doubt that will do her good.
Someday. At present, Sally needs a little Breath Focus Time, a chance to absorb: whoever or whatever started the fire that poisoned the valley’s air in August, Dickie— and Sally Ellen Fincastle Paradiso—hold no legal responsibility for the site of the conflagration. Her ribcage feels like a flower in rapid bloom. “Shaunna,” she says. “Excuse me. I do not want to seem… Would you mind if I close my eyes and breathe a moment?”
“Why, certainly.” Shaunna stands, ready to walk down the hall toward Dickie’s room. “We needed to be talking, Sally. But I apologize if I’ve hit you with too much.” She tilts her head. “You might not believe me, but I always liked you. I hope—I did not plan to say all this today. Sorry. Been a hard week for us all.” Sally, speechless and still sunk into the loveseat’s cushion, bows her best approximation of a Sister Amity bow.
Ten minutes later, she releases her breath focus, walks back to the picture window. She holds Señor Saguaro so he can see the westward vista, range rising beyond range and range. His upraised cactus-arms bring to mind the way that Leonard’s lift in blessing. “Check it out, Señor,” says Sally.

“Ai, carumba!” A cartoon-squeaky voice that could belong to the green humanoid
comes out of Sally’s mouth. “Home.” She doesn’t care if anybody overhears. What do his arms signal now—recognition? Awe?
Shauna’s high heels click back into the lounge, her brief visit over, her late lunch hour nearly so. The green señor drops lickety-split into Sally’s pocket. Rather than open the subject of the man hooked to the monitors, the younger woman inquires about the place that Sally’s just returned from. “One of those ashrams, I gather?” she asks smoothly. But hearing the name of Teacher Leonard, she leans closer. Did Sally by any chance run into a tall young man named Frederick, an artist? “You know Frederick?” Sally cries.
“My cousin. Second cousin. Once removed.” Shaunna stares at an invisible genealogy chart hanging in the air before her. “My gramma and his great-gramma were sisters. I watched him grow up, at reunions.” This fluke means nothing. Except that Sally takes Shaunna’s two hands in hers to say good-bye, surprising both of them. But as Sally will soon explain to Ess, much as her own mama would not have approved of Shaunna, or of Dickie-and-Shaunna, in any way—even Mama would have admitted any true Southerner would and should take kindly to a woman who keeps good track of her kin.

98.

From:
hankq@gritweb.net
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
changes?

This must be a hard time for you, Sally. I was terribly sorry to see your husband’s name on the admissions list when I stopped by Memorial to meet that poor leukemia kid. Hope I didn’t stammer too much on your answering machine—thought you might be coming back but the new recording caught me off guard. Welcome home.

I’m trying to keep you from getting hurt. Trying to do what’s right.

It would be such a pleasure if we could talk. But you won’t call me back, so I expect it’s time to take a chance and put some data in writing for you. 1. A man of our acquaintance in the construction business owns a barn with maybe 300 cans part-full of old paint, plus lots of raunchy leftover solvents and resins, plus used woodwork-stripper (I think it is—for old houses? anyhow, I wouldn’t want to drink it), plus a surprising amount of pesticide. Arsenic, that means. (Don’t ask how I came to know this. Breaking and entering is illegal, even for journalists.) 2. Hiring someone like Clean-o-Sphere to dispose of environmental toxins usually strikes a certain type of person as too expensive. (But who should pay for clean- up if not those who make profits out of making the mess?)

3. This man also owns a piece of land with a sinkhole, out past Campbell’s
Cove—a colleague ran across that fact when checking the title on that tire dump site. (For a while we suspected it didn’t really belong to B. Calloway, but far as she could find out, it did.) The sinkhole’s the kind that country people have been throwing trash into for generations. Only, the trash keeps getting more lethal, doesn’t it? There’s bound to be significant groundwater flow down-gradient from the cave below the hole; I’ve been learning about the karst we live on top of here in Alloway. Limestone caverns, underground streams, all that. A porous wonderland. 4. This same gentleman has hired a below-the-radar guy I know to do a mucky little job with him some night soon. The guy has a dump truck and a record. If you buy him a couple beers and if he’s in the mood, he tells you stuff. Let’s talk, Sally, please. Meanwhile, since I keep sending you my literary musings, here’s something from Kerouac’s essay on his summer alone in the fire-watch tower in the Cascades: “I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind. There’s no need for solitude. So love life for what it is.” Even though you haven’t answered, writing to you this past few months pulled me out of solitude. It’s helped me see the truth of what Jack says. So thanks.
Your faithful correspondent,
Hank

99.

So immediate, so vast, we can hardly bear to speak of it. Not that ever-morphing river of
life with all its radiant braided currents. Not the planet’s marvelous feedback systems. But the immediate vast dying of the film that lies between the bedrock and the fraying
upper atmosphere.

Try this experiment. Bring just one sliver of the subject up. Vanishing topsoil.
Loss of insect pollinators crucial to survival of this crop, or that pretty flower. Nuclear
waste and its staggering persistence. The plain fact that we’ve altered rainfall patterns,
the heats of summer, what we drink and breathe. An hour from now—you might say to
the group around the office paper shredder, to your neighbors in the fast-food line—three
more species will be snuffed. In two hours, six. Three? Nine. They won’t come back. Do so and the talk will halt. Someone may joke, or rant a moment. Someone will
make a fatalistic shrug. Soon new subjects will sweep the conversation with them,
floodwaters down a deepening ravine.

Or else they’ll spout rejoinders—them greenie worrywarts don’t know shit, trust
the free market, god will provide. Science (not individuals and institutions enmeshed in global economics, but some magically funded, miraculously effective, unprecedentedly
listened-to, benevolent egghead deity called Science) will haul us out of this worsening
mess. For sure.

Well, looking at nuda veritas straight-on is so darn wearying. We are, frankly,

not as gods: can’t quite live up to the job description. It seems easier to tie on our own
blindfolds, tuck the earbuds into our ears. To hit the OmniMart and roll our burgeoning
trash cans merrily to the curb each week.

But that way lies a psychic death. Better to resist evasion and its oily palliations.
To recognize what’s taking place in the living world around you. To acknowledge that
your actions, your inactions, both have consequences.
So?
So, gather evidence. Remind. Persuade. Take whatever counter-steps you can: a
vote, a letter, your face among the others at a demonstration, the gesture of some lifestyle
change. Think hard, and hard again, before you choose to have another child, a first
one. These acts may have only slight effects, but they might have great ones. And they’ll
spare you the costly soul-drain of insane disavowal of the facts.

Above all else, resist despair. Love life for what it is. Accept that planets too are
mortal. Mourn if you must. But don’t knuckle under to the destroyers by giving up.
Create solutions. And: document. Write lab reports or op-ed pieces. Make photographs,
paintings, dances—anything to open your heart and clear your eyes and maybe someone
else’s. Tell stories.
Maybe that someone else will do a little more.

100.

One thing must be said about my mama’s hero of heroes, that troubled man of honor and
his times, Robert Edward Lee. He was dead wrong about a few things, but he gave his cause his absolute best shot.

Here’s what he did right: he did not give up when hope diminished. Ill-supplied, outnumbered, he pressed on into battle anyway. Why? Because, he said, he weighed the risks of taking action against the surety of loss if he did not. Or, as my daddy would have put it, better go up against the big boys a-kicking and a-hollering, even when you reckon they are bound to win, than quit before you start. Maybe my time in Naniquaben, or the whole trip up north, or everything that happened since the day I started busting loose by scribbling poetry on the tidy sidewalks of Caledonia College—maybe all that was a vision quest. Trying to stop a beating might get you tossed into the Concord River, and you had best choose your teachers carefully. I know that now. But doing nothing means the old sycamore gets chopped down for a paving crew’s convenience, or someone’s taken out by hypothermia, or your body- painted daughter sits in the Alloway County jail. Doing nothing means more folks—more beings—suffer worse than they would otherwise have to. Means the planet dies way too soon. It was Dickie who let me know what I needed to make happen. Shaunna and I kept doing a do-si-do around his bedside, me going when she was at her desk outside the

mayor’s office. It would be some while before I understood there might be forgiveness
needed asking on all sides—even mine—but we three were managing tolerably well. Then, two days after Ess and I skidded into town, I picked up an e-mail from Hank Q. “Ai yi yi,” said the voice of Señor Saguaro when I finished reading. He was perched atop my computer screen. “That rotten hombre Arjay! He must not get away with such rotten rotten things.” But I myself was…not so sure. Hank’s data surely did buzz round my brain as I drove to Memorial right after. Yet I did not see my part in the picture, maybe because fear of Arjay kept roaring through me like the crash of water over the dam at Campbell’s Cove, back before the drought. And not just fear—it was a crucial feature of my raising, not to make a fuss. So it felt like second nature, to hold my tongue around him, shrug things off, be nice. However I could change that?
I was getting Dickie a drink of water when two things fell into place. One happened this way: I stood at the hospital-room sink, staring down into the glass like I was staring into a well. The water shivered. I recollected that night by the reservoir at the foot of Mount Monadnock. I recollected Tolliver Creek, and the midstream boulder near my campsite back in May. Those rocky, watery places flashed like a tiny PowerPoint show in the heart of that tiny pool. It came to me all of the sudden that at last I knew exactly what it was, the work the gray-man said that I should do.
Only, I did not know if I had it in me, seeing as how facing down Arjay was likely to be involved.
That led directly to the second thing. I stepped across to Dickie’s bed and held

the water to his lips. Fact is, he was doing for himself real well already. Val figured he
would be discharged next day. But he’d just walked a fair ways in the corridor, said it had him pretty near beat. And once I knew he was truly going to be all right, I tended to enjoy reminding him that for the moment he could use my help. He drank deeply. I swear I did not dwell for longer than one second on the time I threw the beer at him, up on the parkway at Arjay’s birthday picnic, and how new and right that felt. We were on the same team now. We had to be. Dickie said he thanked me kindly. I told him he was welcome. He said, “Well, sugar bear, I guess no one can take our old good times away from us.” His gaze was steady as his voice.
The half of me that thought he was being a sweet man said, “No, no, they can’t.” The other half thought, But I might put some of the other times we had out on the two-for- a-quarter table at the yard sale I will be having, come spring. Ess and I needed money.
Val too—no telling what those last-minute airplane tickets had done to his credit card. And Dickie did not need to be staying partners with a polluter and a crook. I took a deep breath. He looked well enough for serious conversation. Also, he could not walk away. “Shaunna and I have done some talking, Dickie,” I said. “I heard about poor Mister Calloway. But why-ever would you let this land-ownership thing with Arjay slide?”
Dickie dropped his eyes and shook his head. His salt-and-pepper head. I plunked the glass on the nightstand. “Maybe he said no on Monday, but you can still get the cash you need to move on. I know you have the papers to make him do it. And you know,” I had no idea I would say this till I heard my voice continuing, “you

know the only way to stop a bully is to stop giving in. Stand up to him.”
“The son of a bitch is my brother,” he said. “Things’ll work out.” That meant: without any action from me.
Slow up, I told myself. Arjay had not exactly treated Dickie like a brother should. To my mind, he had ceded any claim to family loyalty. But…maybe he knew something he could hold over Dickie’s head? Some secret I was not in on? Slow up, slow up. “Dickie.” I took his hand for the second time that week. “I cannot tell you how it cleared my mind to find out that land did not belong to us. Maybe that is the main thing for the moment.”
With that I shut my mouth. I surely did not want to talk about the fire itself. If Dickie had been so angry at the world, at the trap Arjay and the illegal dumping had put him in, at, oh blessed be, at me having a paying job at Earth Wisdom and sitting in that sycamore and putting “Paradiso” into the newspaper as a greenie’s name—why, if he had set that fire, then let him live with it. But for cat’s sake, Sally Ellen, do not make it easy for him to own up to it just now. Some things you still would not care to know.
Dickie gave his quiet grunt. Then he said he’d be feeling a whole lot better about the whole business if not for those damfool kids. That fire still bothered him, he said. “What kids?”
What kids, what kids, what kids? My brain rang so loud I barely heard his
answer: Why, the kids who set the fire that started the tires to burning. Dickie gave me a sharp-eyed look I had not seen from him in quite some while, a mix of teasing and amusement that meant he was really seeing me. He asked what did I think, that the fire had set itself?

I coughed. I grabbed his glass from the nightstand. For the last time in my life, I
drank what he’d been drinking. “What happened?” I asked, real off-hand. There had been no formal charges, he told me. “It was just kids, Sally. Bored with summer vacation, messing around out in the woods. Someone should lay into them, but I expect nobody has.” He patted my arm. “So, you think we can get Sara back to Caledonia soon?”
No mention of me going back to college, of course. But that is not what ruffled my feathers—Ess’s school money and mine and all that could wait. It was the thought that I’d been running all over creation, or Massachusetts anyway, full-up with disquietude over Dickie Paradiso the Possible Crazed Arsonist and my own possible moral obligations, for about exactly nothing—it was that thought sent my blood’s temperature straight toward two hundred and twelve Fahrenheit degrees. Well, I held my peace. He was a sick man trying to be a good father, and it was not his fault I’d mistaken the situation when I saw him flicking that cigarette lighter and looking all heated up.
“You want to take a look at those papers Shaunna copied?” Dickie’s voice broke the stillness that had settled round us—he’d picked up on my agitation and as usual, changed the subject when we got close to something we could not easily talk about, dangling curiosity-bait in front of my nose. “I reckon it won’t hurt to let you see them. Way he did it was kind of smart, really.” That’s how much Dickie Paradiso could still look up to his big brother. I consider it a flaw. The copies were tucked away in a file-drawer, Dickie said. If I cared to try to make sense of the legal jabber, I was welcome to. “Just go in the front office and tell

Melanie I said give you the file marked ‘Number Three Car’. What is this, Friday
afternoon? Arjay’ll probably be there, but he won’t know what that file is.” Arjay. Friday. This was the exact moment I put Hank’s e-mail about dumping poisons together with what Juanita told me in the cafeteria: Arjay’s so-called fishing trip was tonight!
I hightailed it out of there soon as I decently could. Ess was due to arrive any minute, having driven Val to catch his plane back to New Mexico. She and her daddy could surely handle visiting without me running interference. If not, time they learned. A quick stop by the house and then I would be taking care of business. Juanita and Dickie and Shaunna and Hank Q all together had given me the means to do it. Them and the gray-man. I had work to do, a purpose on this precious earth. My fear and niceness would simply have to step aside. I hoped. “Arjay Paradiso!” I yelled as I marched into Paradiso Brothers’ outer office not but one hour later. “You horrible. Ignorant. Eco-thug. You come on out now!” Turning to the office manager, I said, “Melanie, I do apologize for busting in and pitching a fit like this. But Mister Paradiso and I—Richard Paradiso—would take it kindly if you would get me that Number Three Car file and then skedaddle. I’m fixing to have a little family discussion here, and I expect it would bore you silly. Hope you don’t mind starting your weekend a couple hours early. Have a good one, hear?” Now, Melanie (a weak-chinned blonde who was maybe half as smart as Shaunna, which may be why Arjay hired her, making smart remarks about how Dickie’s hire had left them high and dry), Melanie had the file in my hands and her purse and coat snatched up in maybe thirty seconds. But Arjay stayed hid away like a bear in a smelly cave.

I did not close my eyes. I took a couple three-part breaths, recollected the time I
talked to Caledonia’s president and what Kokop’ele said about qi-energy running through me same as through Alander Mountain. I stomped right in. Into the larger inner office, the one with teak paneling and a great big leather sofa. Also, Arjay’s great big mahogany desk. Great big Arjay too.
Why was I so afraid of him? He was not likely to haul off and hit me. And I did not need his approval any longer. That thought felt about like someone took a baby-pack filled with bowling balls off my back. I stomped one stomp closer to his desk. Habits die hard, I guess. I still had to work real hard not to lose my starch. “Whoa, girl,” he said, dropping his Soldier of Fortune magazine and rearing back in his executive-sized desk chair. “What’s got you biting at your behind? Dickie still doing all right?”
Oh, Dickie was doing entirely fine, I told him. Especially now he knew Arjay was going to sign this paper I was holding, promising to buy Dickie’s half of the business, exact terms to be agreed upon by December first, but an initial payment equal to the sticker price of a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, maximum accessories included, due no later than January second.
The Lincoln Navigator part just filled my basket. Señor Saguaro had looked down from the top of my computer screen and suggested it after I rushed home from the hospital to slam out the agreement. Now he was riding in my pocket once again, helping me keep my eyes wide open and fixed on Arjay’s nose. As for the difference between Dickie knowing at the present moment the deal I hoped we were about to cut, and him being soon to know, which was actually the case if

you want to pick at verb tense—well, was that not an English-major grammar-lover’s
kind of detail, and not something for Arjay to bother his pretty head about? Actually, Arjay did not intend to bother himself at all. He shook that wavy hair of his, incredulous, like he was watching a cockfight fall apart when one pitiful abused rooster took it in mind to lay an egg instead of ripping the other pitiful abused rooster’s flesh. “Hold on now, Sally girl,” he said, “what you need to do is settle down. It does not suit me to break up the business at this time, and I see no reason for it. Like I told him back on Monday—”
His face took on a sorrowful look, as if he was regretting the fight that triggered his brother’s heart attack, and for all I know the man did have that much family feeling. Or maybe not. His chair squeaked as he rocked back and forth, talking smooth as a preacher now. “I told him I was sorry for the confusion with that property, but what’s done’s done. Besides, as things has turned out, you-all are better off without the legal title—if anybody takes a hit on that one, it will be me.” On Mount Monadnock, a wind-gust blew me off my feet and off that boulder, but I got up and I kept going.
Exactly right, I said. Which was why he was also going to sign the second paper I had just typed up and printed out—the one promising to give me a receipt from Clean-o- Sphere for proper disposal of all toxic substances now stored in his barn. “Do not think I don’t know what-all’s in there, Arjay, those old resins and that terrible pesticide and the paint in colors no one wants and the solvents and all. Or that you are fixing to dump the whole kit and caboodle into that sinkhole right this evening, using that fellow’s dump truck so can’t no one—so no one can pin it on you.”

Arjay’s flushed face went kind of whitish then. I could see his brain-gears
wheeling, trying to figure how I knew. Me, I focused on how I’d chattered to the annoying Mister Ed right before I skunked him, fluent as a river after a good day of rain. This helped me. Good thing.
“Best not try bamboozling me,” I said. “I will match Clean-o-sphere’s inventory to mine. I have a, a knowledgeable colleague helping me on this pathetic business, so lying will not work.”
Could Arjay see that I’d rushed in here without a whole lot of actual planning and was navigating purely by the seat of my pants? He rolled his lower drawer out, grabbed a quart bottle of Rebel Yell, and chugged himself a chug. “Friday afternoon,” he said like he was announcing that the dinner bell had rung. But his smile said something else, something close to the look on Malthus’ face when everybody in the kitchen was giving him a hard time about the stove fire and threatening to tell Leonard. It was mean and blubbery-scared at once. “You want some?” I did not trouble myself to shake my head. I slapped my papers on his desk. I opened Dickie’s file folder, riffled the legal documents under his spongy nose. “Sign,” I said, hoping I sounded a whole lot stronger than I was feeling. “Both sheets.” Arjay took another swig. He leaned forward on his elbows, like—to holy Hades with Dickie and Dickie’s wife—he owned that office free and clear, owned that sinkhole and could do whatever he wanted to it and never mind anybody’s needs but his. “Now Sally, what makes you think I would piss away good money on that Clean-o-Sphere environmental crap?”
I am sorry to say that at that point I had to fib a little more. I told Arjay I had

given a duplicate copy of the Number Three Car file, in a sealed envelope, to a journalist
of my acquaintance, plus instructions to go public with a real juicy story of small-time corporate deception that would bring a slew of county and state and probably federal officials down on Arjay’s head, if I did not show up at a certain coffeeshop in half an hour to get it back from him. “Or her,” I said, real quick. That sounded pretty TV-like, but I felt it could not hurt. “You know, Arjay,” I continued, stepping up to press against the front of his fancy desk. “Those government people who went easy on Mister Calloway and started cleaning up the dump at taxpayer expense because he did not have the money—they are going to be mad as a whole entire nest of hornets when people read in the newspaper how your legal doings made fools of them. You been thinking what it might be like to spend a few years in prison?” Arjay’s chair squeaked loud as he tilted back. He opened his mouth like a fish in stagnant water.
“The size of your profit margin worth that much?” I asked. “You ready to make friends with your new cellmate, name of Spike?” His red-hot face got a whole lot less red. But he was not talking, no more than a stubborn old reptile would.
Trying to look like Teacher Leonard when he thought a student was getting biggity, I stared at Arjay, hard. “Now, I believe you are a sensible man, Arjay, and it is only sensible that polluters should clean up their own leavings. I believe you’d prefer to spend a little money keeping the groundwater clean, even if you do not give a hoot about what kind of world you daughter’s going to live in, time she gets to be my age. I believe you will buy Dickie out.”

Arjay’s forehead wrinkled like he could not figure how this could be happening,
not here, not now, to him. But he must have spent the months since the tire fire mighty worried about getting investigated—that is surely what had decided him to dump the god- awful poisons he’d been shoving in that barn for years. “Do it out of common decency, Arjay,” I said real quick. “Or do it to save your own hind end. You know your brother will treat you fairly on the buy-out,” I added, thinking, Not that you deserve it, skunk. I could just about see his tail tuck down between his legs. “You know, Sally,” he said as he took another swig, “I used to think you were a real sweet girl.” He reached out for my two papers. “Cute as a button, even if—” He took a pen out of the silver-plated holder on his desk. “Even if you was always trying to get my brother to go above his raising. But now I find out you are not any kind of lady at all.” No mortal Southern woman could resist: “Frankly, my dear,” I said to him as he set pen to paper, “I do not give a damn.” And that was that—the first action of my new, true life working for clean water and the forests and blue skies with enough ozone in that sunscreen layer up there to keep creatures of all species healthy and alive. I could hear Señor Saguaro cheering inside my head as I walked out of that office. I could see his joyous up-raised arms. If he, or the grey-man, or whoever, was the one behind what I was doing, why, it was perfectly fine with me.
So
that
was
that,
except
for
what-all
came
afterwards.

101.

Earth’s thin crust flexes. The continental plate that holds the greatest part of North
America rafts westward on currents of fiery rock. The land is rising now, as it does every month (or so Sally Paradiso heard from a confident H.O.P.E.-ful), pulled a good six inches closer by the full moon. Life on the blue-green planet quickens. In her house on the east edge of the Appalachians, Sally picks up the phone. She makes a call.

Consequently, she sits the next day in a humming downtown Alloway establishment called The Beanstalk, face to face with that mannerly and nearly indefatigable reporter, Hank Quesenberry. She tells him part—part only—of the story of her showdown with Arjay, shows him a photocopy of the Clean-o-Sphere receipt she’s keeping in her new safe-deposit box. “What this all means, I guess, is I’d like to thank you,” she says urgently and shyly. “Really. Thanks.”

“Amazing, Sally.” Hank’s gray eyes shine. “I don’t see how you bluffed him. They never would have prosecuted. Not just that they’re under-funded—groundwater contamination’s too long-term, too hard to prove. And it’s not sexy.” His color rises. “I mean, people don’t get all worked up about it. Should, but just do not.” His foot drifts close to Sally’s underneath the tiny table. “Catch a contractor dumping piles of airborne hazmat, lead-based paint dust or smashed up old wallboard loaded with asbestos, stuff like that, in a poor neighborhood—and believe me, some of them will do it—then you’ve got a case. But this…”

Sally feels the nearness of his foot. His voice continues, touched with a liquid
hint of Mississippi. He cites realities: years, it could be, before the plume of water flowing underground from that fouled sinkhole would have intersected with the first well in its path; the dilution of some contaminants to less-than-officially-prohibited levels and no solid research yet on effects of various poisons interacting; whole decades perhaps before thyroid cancer, leukemia, birth defects, or their vile kin showed up. Arjay would have gotten off scot-free.
Yet interlaced with all these facts comes admiration. Sally cut to the moral chase. She’s stopped her first planet-vandal. Kept the groundwater clean.

Sally covertly checks the buttons on her jade-green sweater, leans a little closer. Should she run through the saga of the tire dump’s ownership, let Hank know the true reason Arjay knuckled under?
But as Hank speaks of the drastic damage Arjay’s toxins were bound to wreak quite soon upon small vulnerable non-human beings in a marsh he knows of, near the sinkhole, Sally returns to her determination: it’ll be some while before she trusts this dogged, gentle, book-loving cyclist that much.

She does listen to him, though. With interest. And accepts an invitation to go hiking next weekend—Hank knows a trail that overlooks the sinkhole and the marsh.

“It’s a rainforest in miniature,” he says. “That marsh you saved—Bearwallow. That’s how full of life it is. You are amazing, girl. Ma’am. Sally.”

Sally blushes an authentic blush. She only did what needed doing, like Henry or Louisa May. The same thing Teacher Leonard urges, really, if you take him with sufficient grains of salt. Besides, she liked it, being brave.

Hanks toasts her with his coffee cup. “To you—and Chestnut Ridge,” he cries, then adds, “I’m surprised a genuine Allowegian like you, Sally, doesn’t know that trail.” He grins and nudges her foot with his. “The winter views are sweet.”

Sally grins back. She holds her tongue. There’re several things she’ll tell him when two years have passed and she has graduated from Caledonia and he’s joined her in the new Buddhist meditation group at the UU church and they’ve moved into a downtown-revival loft together and are starting to talk marriage. But not now.

Now, what Sally does—and this, for her, comes altogether naturally—is start discussing Transcendentalism. She’s spotted the t-shirt under Hank’s tweed jacket; it bears five words in high Kerouac: All things are EMPTY LIGHT. So does Hank think, she asks, that Jack’s declaration basically amounts to what Emerson wrote, that the world is made…hang on, she’s got this memorized, of thickened light and arrested electricity?

What red-blooded English major in the first flush of courtship could resist? Hank and Sally gab on for an hour. They wind up speculating on the deliciously possible slow formation of a subterranean cavern beneath their very feet, as the natural acidity of groundwater dissolves the limestone, proving here and now that all things are empty, all things change.

Nonnie Bee Goode, consulted next day, diagnoses this last bit as metaphor for desire a-building. For good sex to come. “Girlfriend,” she says as the two of them make their way along a fringe-of-downtown sidewalk, “even a Soc major can decode it. The man is hot for you. He wrote you e-mails quoting poetry?” Her laugh rings belly deep. “Take it slow as you want while you finish up with the husband-person but, if you ask me, I say take it.” She bumps one lush hip into Sally’s side.

Then her voice shifts: “Now, you sure you’re ready to see this place again? We can do lunch somewhere else.”

Sally nods. Nods crisply, steps through The Earth Wisdom Whole Foods Co- operative Society’s front door. She’s just come from the House of Yoga. All seven chakras glow invisibly. Her spine ripples. Her head’s held high.

“Surprise!” shouts the carrot-haired young man at the first cash register. “We’ve been hoping you’d come check us out!” “Surprise!” shouts his identical twin from behind the other check-out counter. “How long’d it take you to register that it’s us?” Skinny Timm steps out of the manager’s office, greets Sally with a whoop and a hug. In the Peace ‘n’ Grits Café, Pete bows an Elizabethan courtier’s bow. Soon Sally hears about the disappearance from Alloway of both Yvvie and Noah on the same day, the chaos that wracked the co-op till the board promoted Timm. She hears about the hiring of Beauregard and Rainbow, the arrival of a cheerful postcard from Asheville signed Y. & N.

An altogether different postcard shows up a few days later in Sally’s mailbox by the willow tree. Harper Frank reports that she and Frederick got through the Community discussions without excessive hassle, but she knows a last straw when someone piles it on her back. Too many raps about a war before we can get to Shambhala, Harper writes in neat tiny letters, when we could be there now. She’s gone to a Zen monastery in the Catskills, a very different sort of place. Frederick? He’s applying to art schools. He’ll start his M.F.A. next fall.

This will put him only one semester behind his second cousin (once removed)

Shaunna Robillard, who will in eighteen months become Shaunna Robillard-Paradiso,
and not long after, Ms. Shaunna Robillard-Paradiso, M.S.W. Sally will handle the marriage well enough, just as Dickie will cope with Sally’s lovelife—and Ess and Val, with their rapidly extending family (including Shaunna’s mama Zora and Hank Q’s parents, Eudora and Bill), plus the barely credible absurdity of middle-aged sex. One thing will faze our heroine, however. It will not be the birth of Shaunna and Dickie’s green-eyed, gold-brown daughter—she can’t begrudge them just one child, despite the urgency of lightening the planet’s load. No, it will be the name they give the little girl. Laurel Robillard-Paradiso. Laurel as in Laurel Lake.

A pretty name. A pretty coincidence, perhaps.

But it’s no coincidence, for sure, the next episode in the adventures of Laurel’s high-flying half-sister-to-be, Sara Esperanza. Her return to Caledonia College for spring term—hers and Junie’s—will be worked out in a cascade of forgiveness-seeking e-mails, tearful phone-calls, cozy on-line chats. Shiftless baffled Owen discarded, they’ll move back into Arts House. Ess will cheerfully allow her father—or one might say, her unwitting uncle Arjay—to pay the room and board that supplement her tuition scholarship. With this, the roaming roommates will start the next chapter in their long and mostly happy and very interesting lives together.

Val will sigh, bemused, will wish them well and get back to his studies. In time, Dickie will come fully round. Juanita? She’ll talk with her niece, her daughter, and she’ll try. “Live and let live, Chelsi,” she will say. After all, by the time Juanita lets Arjay know that she intends to marry Burt, she’ll have broken her share of good-girl rules herself.

Sally will never be sure about the true cause of it, next summer, when Arjay drowns in a solitary drunken boating accident in Campbell’s Cove. But she’ll suspect it’s not just happenstance. For, in the last scene of this comedy, four weeks after her first coffeeshop courtship meeting with Hank Q, something maybe inexplicable will happen. She’ll drive alone, one oddly warm west-of-the-Blue-Ridge December night, to that same dammed-up creek. What she sees and feels, the compelling call to go there: these she won’t forget.

It happens like this. Dark cloudbanks gather past Chestnut Ridge, the first storm of the coming drought-break building, cold rains soon to end the current string of dry years—if not the long-term climate change. The moon is full again. The bulging terrestrial sphere prepares for breathing out. At the moment, the moonlight’s still unblocked by cloud. Sally’s unaware of all that lies before her as her galaxy pinwheels on. But she’s been talking with Professor Augenblick and the Office of Financial Aid, with Dickie and their mediator. She’s started in part-time as a copyeditor at The Advance. She’s feeling hope.

In fact, she’s feeling nothing less than happiness. As she parks in the reservoir lot, her mind returns to a notion she and Hank discussed a few days back, on another coffee date. She’d been describing Sister Amity to him. “Aware without despair?” said Hank Q, smiling with one side of his mouth. “It can be done?” A slap to the tabletop. “Yes!” Sally cried. It must be possible, they assured each other—it has to be, and they will do it—to recognize how hard it is, holding off your planet’s murder, and yet not falling into hopeless sadness. And not retreating, either.

Sally jumped up, high on caffeine and visionary readiness. Planting her arms on the table, she made as if about to leap upon it and start speechifying, partly just to get another grin from Hank. “We can,” she said, “make the Arjay hombres cut it out. Make the government rein them in. Make them clean up their own garbage. I will not give up.” She beamed and sat and took a sip and added, “More good news, Brother Quesenberry—I believe I have decided on the other hand that it’s fine to burrow in a little while, come a time you need that.”
“Regroup,” said Hank. He brushed her hand with his. “Rebuild.” “Think or get shut of too much thinking.” Sally nodded, talking fast. “But after that, you have to turn back to the cause.” Hank lifted an eyebrow. “The glorious Cause?” She refused the bait. She’d flirt later, his eyes said yes, and she was on a roll. “You can still feel happy—the greed-heads have not entirely won yet and not everyone is lazy or depressed or, or drugged clueless by the malls or by just trying to pay the rent. You can still feel happy when you look around, when you walk in the woods even if they’re second growth, because there’s…something left to love.” She takes a breath. “And then you can—”
Here Hank joined in, pounding the little table softly, speaking in unison the words he suddenly knew she’d say, “—you can press on, press on.” After, his warm hand rested lightly over hers.
They wound up the evening promising one another to e-mail their senators about an upcoming bill: they want some of the national forest left to grow wild and old again, full of rot and rich variety. She invites him to come over for dinner next Saturday; she’ll

cook something local-grown. Not ten minutes later, for the first time, in the cozy alley
beside The Beanstalk, Hank bent down to her. Sally almost stepped away—good heavens, she did not even know yet if he admired the works of Ellen Glasgow, and good heavens, what if he turned out to be another Dickie, or another Noah?
But no. She would be valorous. She’d try again. They kissed, long and sweet.

Now, called in some mysterious way to Campbell’s Cove, Sally walks the dried lake-bottom till she reaches the water’s edge. She has had her road-trip vision quest, her spiritual retreat. She’s back and she won’t wash her hands of what’s being done to the planetary sister of the moon. She is determined to keep e-mailing, talking, working for clean water and the living Appalachians. She’s pleased about this fellow Hank even though she is not going to rush it. Still, there’s something more she’s looking for. Something fundamental. The thing, whatever thing, that summoned her tonight. Overhead, that white disk glimmers like the first page of a story not yet written. Off to the west, the incoming cloudbank’s indigo-blackness blots another star. All around her, mountains ring the valley. Sally stoops. She picks up a small stone.

It’s a piece of shale flaked off a bed of sediment pressed and hardened for millennia. Were the moonlight sun-bright, Sally might observe on the stone’s gray surface the bony fossil of half a little fish. Instead, she wings it out across the reservoir. Faster than a speeding continent, she thinks.
The stone skips three times: Papaw would have whistled: hoo-eee! It enters the water, sinks. Rings ripple outward, glinting asymmetrical and balanced as a poem. It’s under siege, Sally tells herself, and we may lose it altogether. Or wind up

living on an ugly stinky regimented storm-plagued ultraviolet-battered factory-farm. But
I can see that this green island’s still a paradise. And it’s not it. It’s us.

A long, or short, or uncertain, time-gap later, she’ll stoop again, pick up another stone, slip it in her pocket for remembrance, to jostle there with a wooden figure, astonished arms upraised. As it happens, that broken plate of shale records the traces of the same fish’s other half, traces she in time will notice. At present, however, Sally’s attention turns to the air above the water. Something thickens in the moonlight there. Darkly lambent. Seems to coalesce.

Something iron-colored, trembling, constant and translucent. Eyes half-lidded, lips bent upward at the corners, long braids flowing down. Creature of this sphere and another. The gray-woman eases forward, holding out her hand.

Sally takes it. This is not runaway transcendence, but the humming reeling actual. One more phenomenon arising co-existent with all others. Sally Paradiso feels clean liquid coolness, skin on skin. Touches arrested empty light.

###