Tonight I’ll drop Barry and Tinsley off in Ottawa, where Zach will pick them up and drive them the rest of the way to the farm. There’s a strong back-to-the-land trend among many of our suburbanized, citified, alienated generation (though for some, the only farmland in their futures will be the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta). Tinsley says she plans to stay for about a week. Barry hasn’t said how long he’ll stay, but given what he’s brought, it looks like he doesn’t plan to come back anytime soon.

After I leave them, I’ll continue north to Lake Juliette. To describe myself as looking forward to seeing Robin would be an understatement. Yesterday the mail that had been forwarded to Bay Shore finally appeared on my desk, including her second letter of the summer. It’s nearly the end of July and she’s been at Lake Juliette for a month. There have been many moments when I’ve been on the verge of calling, but long-distance phone calls are expensive, and international calls even more so. Adding to the phone bill after that call I made to Rudy in Saskatchewan would give the paterfamilias fits. (Or is that just a poor excuse for the real reason I haven’t called Robin? Which is that I dread what she might say.)

On the envelope of the new letter from her, our address had been crossed out and the address for the apartment in Bay Shore handwritten in. The letter started off about camp, and the kids in her bunk, the terrible food, and her fellow counselors . . . Then this:

Lucas, I feel bad that you’ve written so many letters and I’ve written so few. It’s been so hard to get my thoughts sorted out. I do apologize for that. But now, the more I think about it, the more I feel that when I go to Middlebury this fall I want to start over. I don’t regret the things we did last spring. Well, maybe a little. But I’ve realized that that really isn’t me. It’s not who I am. Every day I wake up here and it’s so beautiful. You don’t have to get high. All you need to do is go outside in the fresh air. I love being outdoors. It feels so close to what is important. I feel like it could be this way at Middlebury, too.