Leif Enger Quotes

Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.

Fair is whatever God wants to do.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers.

We and the world, my children, will always be at war. Retreat is impossible. Arm yourselves.

Be careful whom you choose to hate. The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly. Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.

Love is a strange fact - it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no sense at all.

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.

It is one thing to be sick of your own infirmities and another to understand that the people you love most are sick of them also. You are very near then to being friendless in this world.

Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.

Good advice is a wise man's friend, of course; but sometimes it just flies on past, and all you can do is wave.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any.

Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

What else exhausts like sustained deception?

Why is it our failures only show us more clearly the people we are failing?

Where do you think you’re going?” Dr. Nokes demanded…. “What do you have for directions?” And Dad… said, “I have the substance of things hoped for. I have the anticipation of things unseen

So thoughtlessly we sling on our destinies.

Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else--ignorance, for example. Same thing happened to the Israelites. Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry

Of all facial expressions, which is the worst to have aimed at you? Wouldn't you agree it's disgust?

This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone's nice surprise.

A person never knows what is next--I don't anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week--a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.

Fresh peach pie can lift a bullying reprobate into apologetic courtesy; I have watched it happen.

Hope is like yeast, you know, rising under warmth.

Pride is the rope God allows us all.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.

It is one thing to say you're at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with it's crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely.

As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.

We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.

When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

Better is here. Stay, and make it better.

My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear miracles because they fear being changed--though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

You never like it to happen, for something as hopeful and sudden as a January thaw to come to an end, but end it does, and then you want to have some quilts around.

The evidence of my life lay before me, and I was unconvinced.

Sometimes it seems every woman I meet is more than a match for me.

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that.

It’s possible to perceive what is coming and still be dumbfounded when it happens.

Say what you like about melodrama, it beats confusion. The truth is we ought have a chance to say a little something when it’s getting dark. We ought to have a closing scene.

We beat the drum slowly and played the fife lowly, and bitterly wept as we bore him along. For we all loved our comrade so brave, young and handsome, we all loved our comrade although he'd done wrong." The Cowboy's Lament

I prayed the Lord would sort (my prayers) out and answer as needed. Above all that he would hurry.

When did it come to Davy Land that exile is a country of shifting borders, hard to quit yet hard to endure, no matter your wide shoulders, no matter your toughened heart?

What makes a Samaritan good is the possibility of the lunge.

I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.

Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

You can’t explain grace, anyway, especially when it arrives almost despite yourself. I didn’t even ask for it, yet somehow it breached and began to work.

...for his life seemed a curving line, capricious, moment by moment inviting grace.

Your tribe is always bigger than you think.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

A line only gets grace when it curves, you know.

Someday, you know, we're going to be shown the great ledger of our recorded decisions-a dread concept you nonetheless know in your deepest soul is true.

Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.

Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.

It’s peculiar, to reach your destination,” he told me. “You think you’ll arrive and perform the thing you came for and depart in contentment. Instead you get there and find distance still to go.

You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sin, you know, and cry tears doing it that are genuine as any.

Yes, yes sir—routine is worry’s sly assassin.

In times of dread it’s good to have an old man along. An old man has seen worse.

I felt laden. Air itself has weight and mass, and Kansas had the most air of anywhere I'd ever been.

It’s never been hard for me to fall in love, a quality that has yet to simplify one single day of my life.

It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

Once torched by truth... a little thing like faith is easy.

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

My sister comes on like a box of nails, but her devotion to the mythic is profound.

Listening to Dad's guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.

It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.

Why am I still surprised when it turns out there is more to the story?

Buttered toast in a sunlit kitchen, a stand of corn and squash out back, a coming reality where sorrow did not draw and quarter them every waking dawn. Is it so much to ask? A three-chord song, a common life? Could we all have that, someday? Could I?

You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own

But the ruinous thing about growing up is that we stop creating mysteries where none exist, and worse, we usually try to deconstruct and deny the genuine mysteries that remain. We argue against God, against true romance, against loyalty and self-sacrifice.

trying to keep him from sinking into the marsh of incurious disapproval that swallows so many ancients.

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, golden and so clean it quivers.

When I woke in the dark I was smiling - it's a happy thing to brace for a visit from old friend Envy who then for some reason never shows up.

My weary old ground was broken and watered, and what sprang up was a generalized longing.

I experienced an unspooling sense of freedom—genuine antagonism is something I’ve rarely encountered, and it felt good to respond with honesty instead of obsequious scraping.

The man on the water stood forty yards out.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all. Virgil Wander

Once traveling, it's remarkable how quickly faith erodes. It starts to look like something else - ignorance, for example...Sure it's weak, but sometimes you'd rather just have a map.

By this time of course reading itself was slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went.

Sleep that day was a warm pool in which I dove and stayed, sporadically lifting my head to sense the world.

A cowboy doesn't ask for much, that's my observation. A flashy ride, a pretty girl, momentary glory...

He stood and nodded at the great whitening sky. “We’re sure small, wouldn’t you say? Takes the onus off, somehow.

....her life would be a giddy crossword, working down from some clues and across from others.

From my first breath in this world, all I wanted was a good set of lungs and air to fill them with... p 1

Although saying this, I realize it may have been illusory. Memory’s oldest trick is convincing us of its accuracy.

One of the things Rune admired about Lucy was her impractical curiosity. She was writing notes in the margins.

Ann rolled her eyes. She had a marvelous eye roll, refined through long discipline, precise as acupuncture.

These thieves and lovers and wandering poets—what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.

His sadness seemed complete. It had left him nothing, no proper enjoyment, no Saturday mornings. Sadness wore him like a tailored suit.

There is nothing wrong with being kissed on the cheek by a sweet round woman in a café after you have nearly died.

May all hanging judges be judged themselves at last.

If you can’t talk sense, don’t talk at all.

And who doesn't long for the door in the air.

Listening to Dad’s guitar, halting yet lovely in the search for phrasing, I thought: Fair is whatever God wants to do.

You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless - for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

He had a hundred merry crinkles at his eyes and a long-haul sadness in his shoulders.

She kept looking away then back to me, as though at a nice surprise. This was maybe best of all. I never once expected to be someone’s nice surprise.

A person never knows what is next -- I don't, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

A person never knows what is next—I don’t, anyway. The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

she had a name made to be embroidered on bowling shirts.

There is no better sound than whom you adore when they are sleepy and pleased

It was wonderful and gauzy, going to sleep that way, like drifting in a small boat over a rippling sea.

I wanted to hear about many small things, the smaller the better. I wanted to tell her small things in return.

I never was anyone's parent, so this rapid expansion of love and terror confounded me.

You know how it is—you grow up with a story all your life, it can transmute into something you neither question nor particularly value. It’s why we have such bad luck learning from mistakes.

I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and rune too, even though he would've offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea.

I made a fist and held it out. It didn't look like much—not like a fist anyone would count on for protection. If war came seeking a person I loved, that undernourished fist was not going to be enough. I would have to put my whole body in the way

Nadine,” said my voice. “You know how people daydream about the Bahamas, with the beaches and palm trees? I don’t know if they really do, no doubt it’s mostly advertising, but you’re the island I think about.

Before reaching Grassy Butte, though, Dad spied a farmhouse with two pumps in the drive and a red-and-white sign out front saying DALE'S OIL COMPANY. Another sign said CLOSED, but a light was on in the house and Dad pulled in, saying, "I believe we might prevail on Dale. What do you think?" "Prevail on Dale," I repeated to Swede. "To make a sale," she added. "And if we fail, we'll whale on Dale--" "Till he needs braille!" "Will you guys desist?" Dad asked.

She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

and one of those interpretive historical markers your aunt reads aloud while nobody listens

He felt confusion coming. The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.

We understood the margins where we lived. Some still enjoyed resenting the far-flung coasts for their gleam and influence, but I think we all accepted the grace of the overlooked.

Don't fear occasional ghosts. Every day my mind suggests two or three impossible things.

Existence is great but don’t read so much into it.

I’d lived years without a woman to tell me small things. Her work went well and she wanted to say so, and I was the man who was listening. That fact swung open and light came in.

You know what you're getting here," I said. "I'm still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again." "None of us are unabridged, as you are well aware.

Once torched by truth, Swede wrote years later, a little thing like faith is easy.

telegram saying, “Existence is great but don’t read so much into it.

Large tomatoes and inner tranquillity are a bewitching combination.

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good.

At bottom, what God seemed to want was affirmation. Basically praise in every circumstance. Without it he could turn menacing in a hurry.

I've always admired the unhurried.

Lark and I had media once—internet, TV, the vivid suspect world delivered secondhand, ready always to predict our moods and sell us better ones—but we were early abandoners.

Those who remained forged a cult of rage.

dudgeon

That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

I knew he used to call the old man Saturday mornings to talk baseball or politics, trying to keep him from sinking into the marsh of incurious disapproval that swallows so many ancients.

But I shook my head. I just couldn't go with him. Nor could I tell him it wasn't his public mistreatment that stole my breath and blocked my tongue; it was something too mean to explain. It was the fact that Chester the Fester, the worst man I'd ever seen, even worse in his way than Israel Finch, got a whole new face to look out of and didn't even know to be grateful; while I, my father's son, had to be still and resolute and breathe steam to stay alive.

Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I've been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.

They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again—even now, some years on, they’re still returning. I’m just so glad to see them.

I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here’s how it went. Here’s what I saw. I’ve been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

it began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

After the derailment I wondered obsessively about the great whatever. Much seemed to ride on the character of the whatever, including the degree and tenacity of my guilt in the matter. But miles pass, years climb up your shoulders. My insistence on Mom's and Dad's joyous afterlife gradually dimmed.

It made me think of Penelope waiting for Odysseus—Penelope at her loom, not missing a trick, lumpen suitors everywhere.

I remember she insisted on reading aloud a longish poem about loving a person who wasn’t there and hadn’t been there in a long time and wasn’t likely to be there ever again.

I had been slipshod and revealed my cards. That alone was probably enough to spoil whatever cosmic narrative I'd struggled to maintain.

Who will ransom earth and water? What new son or what new daughter? Who will make of many, one? What new daughter? What new son?

I'm still fairly far reduced. I may never be unabridged again.

What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage.

You try to occupy this actual world but man there is always a Douglas, always someone ready to fly his pants and call them a flag.

When a flame is lit move toward it.

Feral Comportment Continuum.

A veteran bystander to hard moments, I knew they went by quicker when you were unconscious.

Once torched by truth, a little thing like faith is easy.

Do you know who is up at four in the morning? Dairy farmers. Paperboys. Lunatics.

I sighed. Don't let anyone tell you that looking out for your vulnerable is less than a full-time deal.

Love is a strange fact-it hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things. It makes no since at all.

We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking?

A romantic fears romance is not enough.

Right away I had the sense this youngster was in a story of his own.

Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus--past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow rookf of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone.

Not anymore—not exactly.” If I’d had more words, I’d have described Greenstone’s last operational motel, the Voyageur, a peeling L-shaped heap with scraggy whirlwinds of litter roaming the parking lot. Though technically “open,” the Voyageur is always full, its rooms permanently occupied by the owner’s grown children who failed to rise on the outside.

We sat on low stools under time-darkened timbers, and the steam from our cups rose curling into a sunbeam. I had sailed once with Lark years ago. It sealed us forever, that trip, and also made the sea a thing I loved best at a distance. But safe ashore, who is immune to the warmth of rubbed teak, a gimbled bronze lantern, coffee steam rising in sunlight? I admired Erik. I liked his stories. It felt nice to imagine that I, too, wanted a sailboat. I didn't really. I wanted the twisting steam.

Greenstone is cursed. We had mines, but they shut. Ships used to dock, now they sail past. Our water tower comes loose and rolls over people, our congressman gets leprosy, Bob Dylan drives through and gets two flat tires.” Ann glowed as the idea coalesced—she couldn’t have been more incandescent if she’d physically caught fire. “Hard luck! That’s our legacy.

Oh, his speed was no shock—speed was never Alec’s problem. It was his precision that astonished. Because listen: How many pitchers in any league have a fastball with its own nickname? And what kind of fastball earns the name Mad Mouse? I will tell you: the kind that twists in crackling without one notion where it’s going. The kind you don’t see but hear hissing to itself like the bottle rocket before the bang.

How could we not believe the Lord would guide us? How could we not have faith? For the foundation had been laid in prayer and sorrow. Since that fearful night, Dad has responded with the almost impossible work of belief. He had burned with repentence as though his own hand had fired the gun. He had laid up prayer as if with a trowel.

a clean bass line is barely heard yet gives to each according to their need.

The drink was a storm cloud with coffee thundering around inside it.

She seemed to belong here, though maybe she was the sort to belong wherever she was at the time.

Those thieves and lovers and wandering poets- what big lives they had! I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.

Words are one way we leave tracks in the world,

it’s difficult to do productive work and fume simultaneously—the labor dissipates your righteous steam—so

You said yourself they didn’t hurt your girl.” Waiting, Davy asked, “How many times does a dog have to bite before you put him down?

Not confidence—I understand confidence. What he had was knowledge.

The firelight had restored his face to healthy color and she, all Frenchbraided, scarf unslung, resembled an opportunity missed by Rembrandt.

We all dream of finding but what’s wrong with looking? When the sun rises we’ll know what to do.

Many a night I woke to the murmur of paper and knew he was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James—oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.

The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

more at ease, not only with his dear long-lost but on the boat itself.

Burdens accrue in isolation.

It slowed my pulse to believe in a quiet far-off scientist staying with his work.

He meant to take Flower down the Soo, through the Greats and clear to the salt.

What scares me is the notion we are all one rotten moment, one crushed hope or hollow stomach from stuffing someone blameless in a cage. I

When a person is gripped by a fugue or idea you can't just busy him out of it, not for long anyway.

This phrase lit up an old hallway for me,

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good. Most welcome was his prediction that language would gradually return.

Looking back, I have to laugh. You know why Martin Bligh was strenuous? Whenever I didn't know what to write next, I put a swift river in front of his horse and sent the two of them across!

Nothing could quiet a happy crowd of kids like Mr. Holgren's unannounced appearance -- he loved superintending; he was made for it. So when he marched in that morning with a determined look on his face, we froze. Boys and girls recognize sinister as handily as dogs do. Here it was. My best guess now is he'd got it in his head to try "relating" to us -- but when he produced a paper pilgrim's hat from behind his back and put it on his own head, I think we all nearly bolted.

The good thing about complete darkness is you can lie there quietly and let the other person rethink the smart-alecky thing they have just said. With any luck they'll begin to regret it, or possibly they'll believe you have a magnificent rejoinder in mind but are too well-adjusted to use it.

began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant.

Avoiding my eyes he said a rumor had started that I didn’t make it, that I died in the lake, so he drove out to where it happened and sure enough someone had hung a twist of flowers on the torn fence. Carnations and baby’s breath. There was a white plastic cross and a laminated photo saying, “Virgil Wander RIP.” While he poked around, a little scorched-haired lady arrived in a Chevy pickup and marched to the brink with a rosary. When Tom revealed I was alive she wrapped it around her fist in annoyance and sped off dragging a veil of smoke.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week - a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards. I'm sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word. Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying order and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth. My sister, Swede, who often sees to the nub, offered this: People fear mirales because they fear being changed - though ignoring them will change you also. Swede said another thing, too, and it rang in me like a bell: No miracle happens without a witness. Someone to declare, Here's what I saw. Here's how it went. Make of it what you will.

But these activities—whining about what's fair, begging forgiveness, hoping for a miracle—these demand energy, and that was gone from me. Contentment on the other hand demands little, and I drew more and more into its circle.

...as long as we have the choice to read what we want, I suspect Twain and Homer and the rest will always be with us. The stoutest old writers ebb and flow in popularity; tastes and political correctness and educational trends also ebb and flow, and we have a tendency to embrace the short view because it makes better news stories. So the joy of literature may not be at a high water mark right now, and yet you can walk into the Target store of your choice and pick up Catcher in the Rye. Beauty floats, I guess, along with sorrow and hope. (http://www.wab.org/events/allofroches...)

Speculators make me nervous,” I managed to say in a slow soggy tone. “What needless suspicion,” he said. “To speculate is to imagine. To wonder.” At least I think that’s what he said, before a shape sank past in my murky sight—a watery shape, a descending turtle—and then I knew where I seemed to be, in my honest old Pontiac, ninety feet deep. There sure enough was the ovoid speedometer, there my drifting blue hand. A bit of my brain believed I was dead, believed in the peace, knew the wavery coffee shop was only the weak invention it turns out a corpse can summon. Relief rinsed through me, followed by a chiding phrase from the past—fight the good fight. Someone important had said that. Had I fought well? I didn’t know, but what did it matter? The fight appeared to be over. Then a merry laugh punctured the shadows.

SOON, he replied, which makes better sense under the rules of that country than ours. VERY SOON! he added, clasping my hands; then, unable to keep from laughing, he pushed off from the rock like a boy going for the first cold swim of spring; and the current got him. The stream was singing aloud, and I heard him singing with it until he dropped away over the edge.

Don't you ever doubt it?" Davy asked. And in fact I have. And perhaps will again. But here is what happens. I look out the window at the red farm--for here we live, Sara and I, in a new house across the meadow, a house built by capable arms and open lungs and joyous sweat. Maybe I see our daughter, home from school, picking plums or apples for Roxanna; maybe one of our sons. reading on the grass or painting an upended canoe. Or maybe Sara comes into the room--my darling Sara--with Mr. Cassidy's beloved rolls on a steaming plate. Then I breathe deeply, and certainty enters into me like light, like a piece of science, and curious music seems to hum inside my fingers. Is there a single person on whom I can press belief? No sir. All I can do is say, Here's how it went. Here's what I saw. I've been there and am going back. Make of it what you will.

That was the day I remembered the future, reimagined a path of years with books to read and bass lines to explore. The idea was so tempting I set it aside, but it kept returning, wider each time. Long walks might be out there down unknown roads.

Next morning at church the pastor said our beautiful visitor {the Great Comet of 1965} meant war was coming (...). At twelve I was unsure what to make of his sweltering interpretation but noticed a strain of quiet annoyance in my stepmom's demeanor driving home. When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness has like water over smooth stones. She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman's error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

I wouldn’t say that. Shad’s a good man. Better than most of us, maybe. But he’s …” I shut my eyes, looked for adjectives, and could come up only with “not reliable,” a choice I instantly regretted. Shad had plowed snow twenty years, in dangerous weather, for embarrassing pay. Reliable is exactly what he was. Yet it was also true he had a headful of spiders which woke now and then and altered his personal scenery. Somehow I’d managed to disappoint one friend and rat on another at once. “Don’t

I loved that kite, that cinnamon hound. We were old friends. I had soared and laughed with that kite. It got me out on the perimeter. I felt I had failed it somehow, and Rune too, even though he would’ve offered the string to Leer, just as I had. Thinking it over I became a bit less angry, and more proud of the kite itself: it had refused to be flown by Leer one moment longer. It broke the line and caught the next gust out of town. A perilous beautiful move, choosing to throw yourself at the future, even if it means one day coming down in the sea.

It seemed necessary just then to touch base with the Lord. Shutting my eyes, I leaned into the horse. I prayed in words for a little while . . . and then language went away and I prayed in a soft high-pitched lament any human listener would’ve termed a whine. We serve a patient God. . . . Andreeson, who I’d despised, now appeared to my mind as he might’ve to a worried brother. Talk about an unwelcome change. There in the cold, curled against Mr. Ford’s sighing horse, I repented of hatred in general and especially that cultivated against the putrid fed. A pain started up, as of live coals inside, and like that I knew where he was. Knew, with certainty, why he hadn’t come back out of the blizzard. I began to weep. Not only for Andreeson—weeping seems to accompany repentance most times. No wonder. Could you reach deep in yourself to locate that organ containing delusions about your general size in the world—could you lay hold of this and dredge it from your chest and look it over in daylight—well, it’s no wonder people would rather not.

Once in school, going down to lunch from our third-floor classroom, Valentino Vail had leaned over the banister without warning and loosed a cataract of orange vomit. The stairway was the usual open stack and Valentino’s breakfast just dropped forever, three stories down, touching a good number of lives as it rocketed past and hitting the basement tile with a sound zookeepers must hear sometimes, around the elephants.

Much as I wanted to think of Lark in someplace better, I knew from a thousand conversations that she never worried abut that place. Maybe it was real and full of saints and poets, or maybe it was poetry itself. Her concern was this place. This animal world with its unfurling dread and convulsive wars and fabricated certainties, and its breathtaking storms across the water. With Willow infiltrating the landscape and its stories coming thick and fast - these explorers getting younger and more innocent - I felt desperate to reach through time. I wanted to find these kids in a moment of calm. To take their lapels gently in my hands and say, "Better is right here." I still hear it in Lark's voice. Better is here. Stay, and make it better.

I'd have sunk in the car if Marcus Jetty hadn't been doing a little late-season beachcombing. Marcus runs Greenstone Salvage and Tinker, a famous local eyesore of bike frames, tube amps, hula poppers, oil drums, and knobs of driftwood. He was picking along the jagged strand in his raincoat, eye on a fat cork from somebody's herring net, when a car approached on the highway above. He later described the sounds of a whining V6 and thumping bass line before the barrier burst to shrapnel and the world for a moment muffled itself.

I was drawn on. Conscious now that something needed doing, I moved ever higher on the land. Here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm. It took a long while to traverse the orchard. I began to feel hungry but didn't pause; though all this fruit appeared perfectly available, I felt prodded to appear before the master. The place had a master! Realizing this, I know he was already aware of me - comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember abut him - the way he'd planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand. I kept moving.

Let me say something about that word: miracle. For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal. Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week—a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards. I’m sorry, but nope. Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word. Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave—now there’s a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of earth.

Then Israel Finch got to his feet and pointed the light at Dolly. He told Tommy to hold her arms, and Tommy roared as if they were the funniest words in his reduced language. Realizing his cut wasn’t mortal, Israel slapped Dolly across the mouth, told her she was in for deep regret now, boy, and reaching forth his strong smelly hands rent open the front of her sweater. That, Dolly said, is when she would’ve started to give up inside, had she not looked over Israel’s shoulder and seen Dad coming. Keep in mind he ought not’ve been visible at all; there were no lights on but the flashlight, which was aimed at Dolly. She said Dad’s face coming toward them was luminous of itself, glowing and serene, the way you’d suppose an angel’s would be, that it rose up behind Israel Finch like a sudden moon, and when Tommy Basca saw it he was so startled he dropped her right down on her bottom. She said Dad was as silent, those next moments, as he was incandescent; he made no sound except a strange whistling, which turned out, of course, to be the broom handle, en route to any number of painful destinations. What was odd, she said, was how the boys weren’t even up to the job of running away—Tommy went screeching to his knees before the first blow landed, and Israel prostrated himself and moaned as though the devil had hold of his liver. The two of them just lost their minds, Dolly said, while her own reaction was nearly as insensible; she suddenly could not stop laughing. Here was Dad, his face still lit though now even the flashlight had gone out, smiling (Dolly said) though his eyes looked terribly melancholy, whacking Finch and Basca every second or two while the pair of them shrieked in no English you’d recognize—Dolly said the laughter just flooded through her and came not only from relief, as you might surmise, but from a reckless and holy sort of joy she had never felt before, not even while cheerleading.