I
sit down at a table and open a book of poems and move slowly into the
shadow of tall trees. They are white pines, I think. The
ground is covered with soft brown needles and there are signs that
animals have come here silently and vanished before I could catch sight
of them. But here the trail edges into a cedar swamp: wet ground,
dead fall and rotting leaves. I move carefully but rapidly,
pleased with myself. Someone else comes and sits down at the
table, a serious looking young man with a large stack of books.
He takes a book from the top of the stack and opens it. The book
is called How to Get a High-Paying Job. He flips through it and
lays it down and picks up another and pages through it quickly.
It is titled Moving Ahead. We are moving ahead more rapidly now,
through a second growth of popple and birch, our faces scratched and
our clothes torn by the underbrush. We are moving even faster,
marking the trail, followed closely by bulldozers and crews from the
paper company.
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