“I did! Wait just a minute here! I told you all the time! But you thought it was stupid. Bucolic reactionary pastoral escapism, you called it. Mushrooms on the dead log of Nature, you said.”

That was something Jim read once. “Damn my reading!”

Tom squints. “Actually, I’m reading a great book here. On early Orange County, the ranchero days. Like listen to this—when the rancheros wanted to get their cowhides from San Juan Capistrano to the Yankee trading ships off Dana Point, they took them to the top of Dana Point bluff, at low tide when the beach was really wide, and just tossed them over the side! Big cowhides thrown off a cliff like frisbees, flapping down through the air to land out there on the beach. Nice, eh?”

“Yes,” Jim says. “It’s a a lovely image.”

They talk a while longer about the book. Then a nurse comes by to shoo Jim away—visiting hours are over for a while.

“Jail’s closed, boy. Come back when you can.”

“I will, Tom. Soon.”

*   *   *

Okay. That’s one stop, one step. That’s something that will become part of the new life. All his moaning about the death of community, when the materials for it lay all around him, available anytime he wanted to put the necessary work into it.… Ah, well.

Okay. What else? Restlessly Jim tracks home, starts pacing again. He tries calling Hana, gets no answer. And no machine. Damn it, she’s got to be home sometime!

What to do. No question of sleep, it’s early evening and again this isn’t a night for it, he can tell. His head is too full. As a seasoned insomniac he knows there isn’t a chance.

He stops by his desk. Everything neatly in place, the torn-up and taped-together OC pages on top at one corner. He picks them up, starts to read through them.

As he does, the actual words on the page disappear, and he sees not OC’s past but the last few weeks. His own past. Each painful step on the path that got him here. Then he reads again, and the anguish of his own experience infuses the sentences, fills the county’s short and depressing history of exploitation and loss. Dreams have ended before, here.

Okay. He’s a poet, a writer. Therefore he writes. Therefore he sits down, takes up a sheet of paper, a ballpoint pen.

There’s a moment in OC’s past that he’s avoided writing about, he never noticed it before and at first he thinks it’s just a coincidence; but then, as he considers it, it seems to him that it has been more than that. It is, in fact, the central moment, the hinge point in the story when it changed for good. He’s been afraid to write it down.