But one day I came to stand on the highest point in my domain and saw what I could not have seen from sea level: that my island was shaped something like a boot. (It took some imagination, I'll admit. One could just as well have seen the letter Y, or a champagne class, or a squashed pair of copulating snakes. But Callie would have been pleased at the boot, so I named the island Scarpa.) When I returned to my camp I decided my traveling days were at an end. I had seen other places I might have explored from my volcanic vantage point, but there seemed no reason to do anything about them. I had spied no curls of smoke, no roads, no airports or stone monuments or casinos or Italian restaurants. Scarpa Island ran to swamps, rivers, jungles, and bogs. I'd had quite enough of all of those; you couldn't get a decent drink in any of them. I decided to devote my life to making life as easy and as comfortable as possible, at least until the CC showed up. I felt no urge to write, either journalism or my long-delayed novel, which seemed in memory at least as awful as I had always feared it was. I felt very little urge for sex. My only real drive seemed to be hunger, and it was easy enough to satisfy that. I discovered two things about myself. First, I could get totally involved in and wonderfully satisfied by the simplest of activities. Few of us today know the pleasure of working in the soil with our own hands, of nurturing, harvesting, and eating our own crops. I myself would have rejected the notion not long before. But nothing tastes quite like a tomato you have just picked from your own garden. Even rarer is the satisfaction of the hunt. I got rather better with my bow and arrow (I never got good), and could lie in wait for hours beside a watering hole, every sense tuned to the cautious approach of one of the island's wild pigs. There was even satisfaction in pursuing a wounded creature; the pigs could be dangerous when cornered, enraged by a poorly-aimed arrow in the hams. I hesitate to say it in these peaceable times, but even the killing thrust of the knife was something to take pride and pleasure in. The second thing I learned was that, if there was nothing that badly needed doing, I was capable of lying all day in my hammock tied between two palm trees, watching the waves crash onto the reef, sipping pineapple juice and home-distilled rum from a hollowed cocoanut shell. At such times you could take your soul out into the fresh air, hang it out on the line-so to speak-and examine it for tears and thin spots. I found quite a few. I mended a couple, set the rest aside to talk over with the CC. Which I even began to doubt was going to come at all.