4 December 2001

An eighty-year-old chemist who just married his teenage sweetheart called at two. He asked if I could fix his scanner under Windows 98, and I said I’d try. I hadn’t ridden that road since I helped a poet with a printer. It rips flat and straight for a mile, then stalls and flutters along the south slope of a long point, heading west toward Canada. The salal and ferns and cedars and muddy patches and skating turns and gray sky ganged up and smothered me into a euphoric calm: this is what my home-land looks like in December. Foggy bays through skeletal cypresses, groves of ivy-bound firs and barky alder clans, asthetically foreign gardens in clearings on hillsides facing the road, long gray waves breaking on the lee beach, and mudspatters up the jacket-back: nothing else. I left my bike by a blackberry forest and walked through rotten mushrooms in a soggy orchard facing jay-blue whitecaps and seagulls in the rain. The house faced the sunset over hazy islands over loud surf over a wide tan field. They had been trying to import Adobe PhotoDeluxe scans into WordPad for their Christmas card; I set them up with jpegs and FrontPage. It took two strikes of the birdcalls-on-the-hour clock to explain it all, but they got it. I wouldn’t take money, so they sent me off with a gallon of apple-juice in a warped thirdhand plastic jug.