It was only a little after five A.M. and barely light; dawn in June comes early in northern climes for reasons which a reader might check in an encyclopedia (Johnny himself owned the fourteenth edition of the Britannica, published in 1929, in order to avoid all those chilling photos of jet fighters, and mockups of atoms falling apart with disastrous consequences). He drove down to Lake Michigan, only a few miles from any farmhouse on the hilly Leelanau Peninsula. It was one of those rare lambent, umbrous mornings when the still warm air was full of green haze, and presented the illusion that one lived in a fairy tale, and everything would work out. Somewhere on this beach, he thought, Rapunzel might lie in wait in a pup tent. The dog was head deep in the water; his preferred method of drinking was merely to open his mouth and let the water run in. Johnny tried to remember when he had last been up at dawn without staying up all night. To be frank, he couldn’t, and it occurred to him it might be time at his age, forty-two, to start turning back the old Big Ben alarm. It was the only chance in a frenetic world to see the true serenity of earth, he thought. There was the troublesome idea that Lake Michigan should somehow look bigger, though you couldn’t see across it, and it stretched nearly four hundred miles from Chicago to so far north that Chicago was easily forgotten; and the water was so pure and clear it might remind the natives of the north of the Bahamas had they ever been there, which they hadn’t. The thought clarified itself when he remembered that the Pacific looked much larger than the Atlantic. Then the dream came back with such force that he looked around wildly for company to convince himself he had returned from the dreamworld: Hudley streaked past, chasing a flock of flying gulls with comforting awkwardness.