Six or eight deer jerking up their heads.
Lowering them circumspectly.
You creep to a standstill at the one stop sign on the one fully paved road in Bovill, a townlet of a townlet with six bars, a boarded-up hunting lodge from 1907, a couple of swaybacked trailers, then you swing right onto an even less-traveled section of Highway 8 that almost at once hoists itself into mountains.
You clear-minded, like you can see everything there is to see.
The ten-foot-tall orange snow-markers along the shoulder.
The road picking up a wobbly creek to the left that crosses over to the right and then left again.
How the clouds are closer to the earth at this altitude, how microclimates function: how it is sunny where you are and precipitating iron mist a thousand feet above you to the north.
You and Andi begin to sing along with “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” on Sticky Fingers at precisely the same time.
A warm pause charging the cabin.
Andi no longer cocking her mouth open.
You feeling better and better about the day.
And now you both laughing, looking out the bug-spattered windshield.
A crow circling far above the trees like a tiny black grin.
A mile before Elk River, the last town this side of the wilderness, you slow and turn south off the highway and bump along a rilled dirt road for another mile and a half until the woods open into a makeshift gravel parking lot with two outhouses at the trailhead.
It takes you a few minutes to organize yourselves, stash the cassettes, roll up the windows, transfer the contents of the cooler to the day packs, make sure you have not forgotten anything.
You start off down a path that for the first few hundred yards is wide and true enough to allow a Jeep easy passage, then, as it initiates its rapid descent toward the lower of the three falls, narrower and increasingly snaky.
Neither of you speaks.
There is nothing important to speak about.
You can tell Andi is beginning to let her mind wander, thinking about the sunshine through the branches, the chitter of chipmunks, the sounds of you occupying this geography.
You feel content, insubstantial, like you are walking on a rubber gym mat.
Auztin’s ghost.
Auztin’s ghost unexpectedly lifting in your imagination.
A bag of some kind of unidentifiable purplish-blue chips in his hand.
He has on an over-sized t-shirt with a primitive red-and-yellow child-scrawl face on the front, below which it says in bold black letters: HE WHO LAUGHS LAST THINKS SLOWEST.
He is also wearing a pair of matching red-and-yellow splints that impedes his wrist movements, making him seem to some extent robotic.
You have been working at your computer in your office.
Idaho, huh? he says, probing his bag for a chip more special than the rest. Isn’t that where they like talk about basketball and corn?
You are disconcerted by the idea his chips may be grape-flavored.
That’s Indiana, I’m pretty sure, you say. Indiana or Iowa. Idaho is where they talk about landscape and fly fishing. Landscape, fly fishing, and the plight of the salmon. The endangered salmon, they say. The endangered spotted owl.
Right on. I ate salmon once. It tasted totally (he searches for the ideal word) fishy. So this is the state where everyone has different length legs?
That’s Mississippi. Mississippi or Alabama. What can I do for you, Auztin?
Just dropped by to say adios. It’s been, you know, fun and all.
Thanks. I’m sure we’ll stay in touch.
He ducks out, ducks in, continues to probe his bag.
But… I’m just curious here, okay? Doesn’t it like stand to reason that if you’ve seen one tree, you’ve pretty much got the arboreal business covered?
A lot of people think so.
He looks up, smiling too much.
So we’re talking upstate New York, basically, only with a greater resinous-sap concentration.
Have a nice day, Auztin, you say.
He scrinches his face.
Minuscule purplish-blue particles cling to his print.
His fingertips look as if he has dipped them in a bowl of Hawaiian Punch.
You’re a very strange little man, he says.
You turn back to your computer and examine what is on the screen.
A minute, and Auztin’s MessageWatch makes a sound like an emu behind you. You swivel in your ergonomic chair. Auztin pushes a few buttons with a gooey grape forefinger.
What? you ask.
Gotta move some bad bonds, he replies, backing into the corridor that mazes between cubicles. Have a good life, dude. Live it up. Sounds like you’re gonna have a regular fricking Mardi Gras out there…
The waterfall sneaks up on you: the distant rumble, the subway thunder, and whoosh: the trees parting and the expanse of blue-green mountains tossing all the way to the horizon and the colorful mist of flowers glissading down the slopes toward the black water turning foam-white as it launches into a hundred-foot plunge toward the pool below.
The problem being, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying, the digital organizers with four megs of memory.
The digital organizers with four megs of memory, rechargeable batteries, and those optional sleek aluminum cases.
The trail you are on concluding with a small fenced-in overlook.
You and Andi unpacking, passing utensils and food back and forth.
The problem being the way people wandered among cubicles poking at digital organizers with their slender styluses as if such a display of steady industry and status were customary at every point on the globe.
Andi goes for the scotch and the chocolate-chip cookies.
You open a beer, stretch out on the ground, slip a palm behind your head.
The problem being the way with each poke people said without using language, without using speech: Look at me. I have more appointments than you have. I’m busier than you — and my machine does spreadsheets, too.
Andi offers you a sandwich and you put the beer down to receive it, then listen to yourself chew wetly.
You scoop up a handful of potato chips, chuck them into your mouth one at a time, enjoy each salty paper-thin crunch.
Before long, you are watching your daughter again.
She is one and a half, rocking forward in her highchair at the dinner table, meeting your eyes with purpose and concentration, her face reddening as she unselfconsciously takes a dump in her diapers.
At some point realities have slid past one another and you find yourself beginning to love her.
As difficult as that may be to believe.
As difficult as that may at first be to believe.
Newborns who hear the funeral passages from Belioz’s Symphonie Fantastique begin to squirm and cry, while those who hear perfect fourths and perfect fifths begin to smile.
How can this be?
Gen is two, counting each stair as she warily mounts them on her ascent to your loft and, reaching ten, squats and begins to whimper because she lacks the word for eleven.
The air smells like dry sandalwood.
Pine sap.
Hot earth.
The problem, in other words, being that muscle mass peaks at twenty-five and then decreases by about four percent per decade until the age of fifty.
Then it decreases by about ten percent per decade after that.
Babies are born with black-and-white vision.
Out-of-focus black-and-white vision, like a photograph by Niépce.
Living in only one world when you can live in two.
This is the country where all animals are named the obvious names. If a black dog has a white throat, it is called Spot. If an orange tabby has prevalent stripes, it is called Tiger.