Of course when you go from forty grand to unemployment you see the elevator continuing to descend far below you. The only thing you lack is the rope around your neck. But they were both desperate to escape Lansing. Excluding the Upper Peninsula, you might regard Michigan as a mitten; anything south of the beginning of the invisible fingers constitutes the industrial and farming flatlands, basically a wretched area resembling the Midlands in England, combining the charmless agribusiness—vast single crop farms—of Ohio and Iowa with factory cities as dim and blighted in their own way as Calcutta: Flint, Lansing, Detroit, Battle Creek, Kalamazoo famed in story and song, Muskegon. Of course these cities are prosperous with labor exacting munificent wages and management living on grandiose sums, but in terms of quality of life it is something like owning the very best, most expensive diving equipment and only having a cesspool or mud puddle to swim in. So they fled to an area that held for Warlock the summer memories of his youth until college: the northland with its crystalline lakes and streams, small villages pervaded by the scent of pine forests that surrounded them, hills, dales, valleys with small marginal farms owned by people not at all unlike their southern counterparts; that is, basically small minded and stupid but possessing a specific archaic attractiveness—nostalgia in the flesh. The catch was, he thought, looking out the window at the small lovely valley, the catch was that the north was growing daily more and more unlike the north of his dream-bound youth. The small farms were steadily being bought up by doctors and stockbrokers for vacation and retirement homes. The quiet lakes were crowded with cottages, and the small villages had begun to affect a false front, mansard-roofed, Swiss chalet look. Solvent hippies had moved in with their arts and crafts boutiques and health food stores—leather and hokum Indian jewelry, groats and granola and magnum vitamins to counteract their drug ingestion. There were even a few shabby communes supported mostly by collective allowances. Back road properties now abounded with No Trespassing signs to protect the swamps and pine barrens from nonexistent intruders, and garish Day-Glo Keep Off signs for nighttime wanderers.