I gave hay and water to the sheep and threw down fresh straw. I napped in the hay. I noticed for the first time how the year was looping, fall memories laying over old fall memories. The hickory turned yellow and dropped its leaves. It was a day like this when Queen killed the heron.

At dinner, Dice told us about Osha and Cuke’s bombing the dragline excavator. I imagined their lobbing handmade grenades into its bucket. He talked about waging war on behalf of nature. The family roared, booed, applauded, in urgent merriment. Dice let us enter his room, where Osha and Cuke sat on pink cushions, bandaged and monstrous. We approached them one by one and said thank you. The burn appeared to have eaten one of Osha’s eyes. Five long tentacles of burn wrapped around Cuke’s throat and jaw. They smelled like rancid burning oil. And yet they sat completely still with stiff, perfect posture that betrayed agony.

I wondered if they’d ever work again. I wondered whom he’d send out next. What if I burned up like they had? Would I put myself in danger for Dice, for the climate, for the mountains? Yes, I thought, I would. I was always willing.

We had the real solution for living with the Earth. I was only just beginning to understand how difficult the real solution could be, but that made it more true, more real, especially when I had Dice and my family to inspire me, people who lived selfless lives in the ceaseless present. Trying to live in the present is like trying to sip from a waterfall. Can you open your mouth and let the whole waterfall flood in? They would never look back on their lives and see years of sleepwalking, of petty discontentment. I wanted to be as alive as they were. I wanted to understand what life meant.

After visiting Osha and Cuke, we gathered again in the meeting room. I wanted to sing till my throat hurt, or hear one of Dice’s stories, because stories and singing dissolved my worries, made me certain, banished the definite self.

But instead, Dice made Rainer stand up. “Rainer broke a jar,” Dice said. “A jar of jam.” A hiss went up around the table—sauerkraut would have been one thing, because it was easy and plentiful, but jam was precious, a basket of apricots in each pint. “I need each of you to tell him what that really means. Tell him what his error means to you.” So we went around the table and each person murmured something—“That jar will never carry another harvest,” “That jar served us for many years,” “Rainer, you have wasted our bounty.”