Loon Lake Read Online Free PDF

truck or a car and it would shock me. I’d veer off to get as deep in the woods as possible. It was difficult to keep my sense ofdirection, difficult to put life behind me. I’d come along into a clearing and find the remains of a fire or an empty wine bottle. Traces of human life everywhere: stone fences, old trails, dirt roads grown over. I found a busted inner tube, yellowed sheets of newspaper with dates on them from the early summer.
    But I saw no one: any stiff in his right mind would get out of the Adirondacks before autumn.
    By the late morning I was so hungry I changed course and went downhill till I found a paved road. I walked along the tree line for several miles and came to a country store with a gas pump and some chickens in a coop. Stood in the trees and waited to see a black Model A or perhaps a carney truck or even a state police car. The odds were against it, but I was not thinking odds. The carney was a territory in my mind. It loomed out further than I had gone or maybe could go.
    There were no cars. I slid down the embankment of loose earth behind the store and went around front and stepped in the door like any customer. I had my savings of the summer, twenty-six dollars, in my shoes; in my wallet I carried three dollars more. I bought a loaf of wax-papered bread, some slices of baloney, a bottle of Grade A milk and a package of Luckies. The store lady, short and wide and with thick dirty eyeglasses, treated me as if it were the most normal thing in the world for someone to come along from nowhere, as maybe it was.
    I went down the road till it curved out of sight of the store, and then I ran back up into the woods and found a tree in a spot of sun and sat there and made my lunch. Then I went to sleep for a while, while the woods were still warm, but it was a mistake because I suffered terrible dreams of indistinct shapes and shadows and awful sounds of violence. Someone was crying, sobbing, and it turned out to be me. I jumped up and got going again.
    I went deeper and deeper into the woods and sometime at the height of the afternoon wandered into a stand of ancient pine with a porous forest floor of brown pine needles that was so soft you couldn’t hear your own footsteps. It was dark in here, there was an umber twilight in lieu of the day, and there seemed to be no usual busy life at all, no birds, no insects, just this dark place of unnatural quiet. Looking up, I could hardlyfind anything green. Yet it was not threatening, the solitude was so complete, the stillness so perfect that I felt as if I had come into some vast, hushed cathedral of peace. Not even a Father. I stopped walking and stood very still and listened for I don’t know what. And then, right in my tracks I sat down and for a while was as still as everything else.
    I thought of Fanny the Fat Lady’s warm hand on the small of my back.
    By early afternoon I was traveling again on roads, only jumping off to the side when I heard a car coming, or taking to the woods in order to skirt a town. I went along that day with no destination in mind, no plan of action except to follow the rise, and go for the altitude. I had no food left and did not feel I needed any. I came out to a broad plateau and looking out ahead of me realized I had gone past the region of towns and now, for my arrogance, had no hope of supper unless I found a farmhouse somewhere.
    The open ground was uncultivated, mile after mile. I was on a crumbling two-lane road with grass growing in the cracks and this suggested to me the unlikelihood of a ride coming along. Still I kept going.
    And then with the sun turning red as it dropped toward the evening, I saw to my left, perhaps fifty yards into an open space of tall weed and tangled brush, a single-track railroad embankment. Behind the embankment was a curved outcropping of shiny flaked rock. I got up on the embankment for a professional survey: I had happened upon a one-track spur line of some sort. I figured that as it