He still remembers the cold. And the beauty. Even the highway, lined with birches, was beautiful. It was his first time north of Boston. His first time seeing birches. Some of them really were bent forward like girls drying their hair in the sun. Just like the poet said.
The mountains loomed with dignity. The road wound through. He wanted to climb the peaks, to know them more by knowing them differently, but his old life demanded him. The plane would leave Manchester at 6:15.
As he drove, he wondered if to catch the plane would be wrong. He wondered if he should continue on to Littleton, to the roof of America, and live a new life. A life based on his desires, and not his competencies.
He wondered, even though he knew that he had no real talent for his desires. He had always had brains, but never strength. Never ruggedness. Never the right instincts. He could not distinguish berries from poison. He would not hunt.
He was natural to another life. A life of good things, like words, but also one of offices and windows that do not open. Of recycled air and vitaminless light. A life he could endure by sitting in the office, or on the train, and thinking on the moments that seemed to be true life, like the first time that he went to the Basin.
The parking lot was empty and covered in white. He opened the door and there was no sound but the distant Pemigewasset and the sporadic whush of trees shivering off snow.
He walked toward the river and watched the liquid dance behind the evergreens. Clear water running over rock. The crunch beneath his boots. Fox tracks.
The Pemi swirled into the deep bowl that formed the Basin. It was the prime of winter and some of the water had frozen into a curved ice sheet that glistened against the flow. A sign said that Thoreau had once been there. Thoreau, who fished in a stream called time.
He left the Basin, but took it with him. He carried it on the plane over America. He carried it up into tall buildings and down into the subway. Into dark places. Into holding cells with sad prison men. He used it when he needed it, to open the sealed windows and touch the clouds.
The Basin was a treasured moment. A pearl of experience spread unevenly with too few other pearls, on a thread of unknown length.
