I looked at her face and imagined clinging to the top of a boxcar as it spanned gorges, as it wended a silver way up the Rockies. I imagined losing all I’d brought through the hole in the pig in the bucket.

But I didn’t want transience. I wanted community, bound tight. “Don’t leave,” I said.

When Queen opened the dairy door, a tiny cat ricocheted away in fear. The lightning bugs surrounded us like a storm.

* * *

In the bright fields, pulling up weeds, it was impossible to dwell on Queen’s question. My body knew that what I was doing was right for the land. Who else lived like this, so purely? There was no other place like the Ash Family farm. There were guest ranches and co-ops and sects, homesteads all through Appalachia, but there could be no other place so absorbing, so thorough, that allowed us to break down the borders between self and nature, to install cooperation, not competition, as the guiding principle, something that would not change as long as we behaved as though there was no definite self.

During breaks, we lay on the porch. The whitewashed light made our dirty faces look like bronze. We snacked on sour grass and blackberries. Sometimes Queen and I snuck chocolate chips from the storage house. Bay was still gone, and my yearning for him was as clear and fast as the stream as it plunged downhill.

Ursina and Osha and Terra were in charge of constructing something for the next direct action, which they were planning for the fall, maybe October. I waited for them to ask me for help. I watched as they soaked old jars and rubbed off the labels. They grated the bar soap, filling boxes with pearly shards. I guessed they were making some kind of foam to white out windows or gum up machines. They’d blocked off a few of the barn’s vacant stables. I pressed my eye to the gap in the planks and saw their towering formations of jars and soap boxes. I would be asked to join them. Besides the ice cream, I’d done everything right this summer. I worked hard. I was working hard to lose track of myself, and in the evenings under starry skies I could lean my head back and feel nature streaming through me like electricity.

One moon-bright night, Dice stepped into the circle to tell us the story of an air force pilot named William Rankin, who ejected from his failing plane into a North Carolina thunderstorm. A ten-minute skydive ended up taking forty minutes, as the storm tossed him around like a cat. He saw the lightning where it formed, its illusory size, which he said was “like blue blades several feet thick.” Dice spoke slowly and I closed my eyes, floating in the storm.

He said, “Lightning may seem to be many bright yards wide, but it’s really hardly thicker than a pencil.”