The Point of Vanishing Read Online Free PDF Page B

stacked in the garage, but it seemed a good idea to lay in the additional four cords I’d need to make it through the winter. Nat hadn’t been home. I’d left a message with his son. “Any time would be fine,” I said, trying to make a joke, “I’m not going anywhere.”
    The driver, his arm slung over the door of his truck, looked into the meadow with mild curiosity. Feeling foolish, I took a step out into the open. The truck slowed almost to a stop. The man, who could only be Nat, peered in my direction from under his baseball cap. I slipped back behind the tree. My heart was racing. The gnarled bark was cool to the touch. The leaves were a pattern of light and shadow. I couldn’t help it. My instinct was to stay hidden. It was oddly thrilling, oddly advantageous, to beinvisible. It wasn’t a game. It felt primal. I slid my left eye to a gap in the dense tangle of apples and leaves. The man scanned the meadow once more, then drove on, down the steep grade towards the house.
    A word of explanation. The idea of my morning walk was to walk as slowly as was humanly comfortable and to see and hear as much as I could see and hear. If the front door’s glass pane glowed with sunlight, I’d step outside barefoot and wander up into the pasture. The apples were ready for eating, green flushed here and there with red, and marked with blemishes, like small patches of burlap. By the second week, I’d learned to choose not based on size or beauty—they weren’t supermarket apples—but by ripeness, by how easily an apple gave itself to my hand. Most resisted, played coy, and I’d court them for days, the branch pulling back, the leaves rustling and chattering like so many protective sisters. The first bite was like walking outside all over again—the explosion of taste not like wading into the morning but like diving: the sunlight brighter, my skin more alive. If I ate slowly, it seemed I could taste the chill of fall nights, the warmth of late summer afternoons above the grasses. Then I’d continue on the thin trail of mud past the apple trees, past the old tiller on its side with rusting teeth, past the crumbling stone wall, and follow the trail as it began to climb. The forest was mostly maple and birch, with a high canopy that wasn’t too dense, and about half a mile up, the dirt trail dissolved like a broken thought into nettles and fallen leaves. Here I had to go slowly if I was barefoot—the nettles stung so badly they left little red slashes on my calves—but the softness of the dirt was too pleasurable to pass up. I’d chart a path by looking up the hill to the space of sky where the trees opened. There was a shelf of land there, perched atop a steep meadow. A log cabin sat at the bottom whose owners must have lived far away—there was never smoke rising from the chimney—and beyond the valley the uninhabited hillsrose again, leading out to a few distant peaks faint blue in the distance.
    As I walked, I found myself trying to move through the woods without snapping any branches, with no sound beneath my feet. If my mind made any rustling sounds, I’d wait until it was quiet, too. There was no reason not to wait. Sometimes my mind would start back up, but I began to listen less and less. I didn’t want to block myself from the morning in any way. And those first weeks, when I did manage to be slow and quiet, the woods made me feel as though I’d passed through a canvas, somehow passed through a curtain into the backstage of a painting, into the very source of its light. It was a realm where nothing could be translated. It was a realm I didn’t want to come out of, a way of being I didn’t want to leave. It felt like there was nothing I couldn’t see. The first step back onto the soft dirt ruts leading down to the house often came tinged with a surprising sadness. The voice in my head, like a faithful dog,