Well, it sure has been interesting around here the last week or so. I guess I should start with last Thursday, or maybe it was Friday, you know, when you don't work for a living no more, you kind of lose track of time because all the days start to look the same. You know--you do the same thing Friday that you did Saturday that you did last Wednesday that you'll do tomorrow and pretty soon there's nothing left to tell them apart. I never thought that about not working, that it would do that. I used to hear old retired guys complain about it but it never made no sense to me before. It always seemed like heaven to me to have no job you had to go to, no boss yelling at you to worker harder or faster, no feeling half-dead when you went home so tired you couldn't hardly lift your beer, and it's true that it's really nice not to have to worry about all that shit and have some energy left for when your girl comes over, but it's got its bad side, too, and losing track of time is a biggie. The days just sort of float by and then the week is gone and it's Sunday again and you think, "Jeez, that was quick." And then there's the days that never seem to end at all, they just go on and on and every one of them is just like the one before and the one after and you think, "Goddam, when is this gonna be over?" So I guess I get where they were coming from now that I'm sort of temporarily semi-retired for a while. You do get tired of it after a few weeks and you wish something would just, like, happen, you know? Break the monotony.

So I got my wish. Me and Professor Pete was out on the deck drinking beers, as per usual, when Amos Pepperell come storming up in his big old Ford pickup that sounds like a cement mixer because it's got a bent rod that Amos won't fix so long as the truck is still running. "When she quits," he says, "that'll be soon enough." Maybe he's got a point. That damn truck's been like that for more than two years now and it ain't broke down yet, though it does use one hell of a lot of oil. Some days is worse than others and when it's bad Amos comes whacketting down the road so loud you can hear him when he's still the other side of the mountain and if you look up you'll see this huge, black, oily cloud of smoke hanging over the tress he just passed by like something evil this way comes (I just read that. It's by this guy, Ray Bradbury, who's pretty good but I think I liked the title better than I liked the story, although he's got this one story, "Rain", which is scary as hell--at least, I think it was his story. I been reading so many sometimes I get confused as to who exactly wrote what or where I seen it or what book it's in, and then when I try to find it I don't even know where to start. Anyway, "Rain" is about nothing except what it would be like if we poisoned the earth so bad it all got into the water and turned the rain poison, too. In his story nobody ever walked in the rain because if you actually let some get on your skin it would kill you, so people stayed out of the rain and when they had to go out they wore these space-suit things to protect themselves. I think the scariest thing about it was thinking about how easy it would be to turn something as normal as rain into something deadly as a water moccasin so you couldn't just go out in it, you had to plan to go out in it and wear special clothes and all. It would be a whole different world, you know? Jesus, are we actually doing that? I think of all the smokestacks I seen, specially down toward Portland and then going into Boston and all that crap coming out of them, and that's just one little chunk of a real big country. We must have millions of those things. Sam was telling me about how Canada is suing us on account of what the poison we make down here did to their trees up there, and I know what she means. I went up on the Allagash a couple summers ago hunting and there was big stretches of the trees practically dead and when I asked somebody, was it blight or what? they said it was acid rain that was killing them. That acid gets into the air from power plants and then it mixes up with the clouds and when it rains the acid comes down with it and kills the trees, just like in the story except it ain't got to the point where it's killing people yet. I guess that's the only difference. That's what really scared me about that story--what he was talking about, it could really happen. It's not just something a writer made up.

Like I know if Steven King writes about huge spiders that can read what you're thinking and even put pictures in your head to make you think what it wants, that's kind of fun and spooky but it ain't real. I know I ain't ever going to be walking down the road to my cabin some night and run into one. But this Bradbury guy is different. Oh, maybe it won't happen now but it could happen ten years from now, or twenty, and when I finally get retired myself it'll turn out I can't play golf after all because the rain is all poisoned and you can't go out, and I don't know what any retired guy would do if they can't play golf. I was talking to Burt Titwell a while back and he was telling me that's what you have to do when you retire, you have to play golf, otherwise nobody will talk to you because they think you're stuck up and because if they can't talk to you about the golf game that day then they ain't got nothing to talk to you about at all. I just hope you don't have to wear those damn plaid pants when you do it. I'll wear my jeans but I wouldn't be caught dead wearing them ugly things. There's one pair I seen Ed Pickerel wearing when he was going to the country club down to Presque Isle that was exactly the same color as puke, and the rest I seen ain't much better. We don't have a golf course in Wilbur, and a good thing, too. I don't think I could stand going out every day all summer long knowing I could come around any old corner and have to deal with Ed Pickerel's pants right there in front of me. I seen them once and that was plenty. You couldn't put a golf course on these steep hills, anyway. Every time you hit the ball up the hill, it'd just roll right back down and you'd have to hit it again. A golf course in Wilbur would be terrible frustrating, I would think, although you wouldn't have to waste a lot of money building 18 tricky holes. One would be enough to keep everybody pretty busy.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, Amos. But actually all that about the acid rain sort of fits because what old Amos was so fired up about was he just got this notice from the state that they're going to take his slope and put a highway on it. He said, "All them cars and trucks'll kill that river! And the salt in wintertime? They can't do that."

I said, "I suppose them taking your slope don't have nothing to do with this, you're just worried about the river."

And he look at me sharp and he said, "It sure as hell don't help. My slope, that's watershed land."

Which I took to mean he wasn't any too thrilled about losing his slope and he was getting his arguments ready. Amos is a sly old fox and he's had a run-in or two with the state before and most of the time he's won, but this was a highway, not some tax bill he could bull his way out of. "Amos," I said, "this is too big. You can't fight city hall on something this big."

"Not by myself, I can't," he says. "That's why I come to see Pete." And when he said that I saw Pete go white as a ghost. I figure he knew where this was going to and he'd rather be back facing the bear. I didn't blame him.