I crossed Main and headed out of town on Trask Road, Dory’s directions on a post-it note affixed to my dashboard. The storm had passed, leaving a freshly scoured blue sky and polished green leaves. The world looked newly made and invested with an otherworldly radiance, the thick swaths of sunshine laying on the fields and woods like a coating of honey …

Like the Aelvesgold I’d seen in Faerie and dreamed of last night. The dream came back to me now, how he’d filled me with the hot gold light, how I had felt, making love with him, as if I’d become a part of the stream and the grass, as if we were merging into the elements and into each other. I could almost feel it now as I looked into the dark forest to my left and the purple and green grasses swaying in the fields to my right – a sense of being connected to the world in a way I’d never before experienced. A delicious melting …

A pick-up truck honked its horn at me as I strayed over the yellow line into its lane. I startled out of my erotic reverie … and realized I had no idea where I was.

I checked Dory’s directions. I was supposed to follow Trask Road past Hoot’s Hollow Road and the farm stand at Butt’s Corners, and then turn onto Olsen Road. But I couldn’t remember if I’d passed Hoot’s Hollow or Butt’s Corners. Trask Road looked pretty much the same wherever you were on it: dense forest to the east, farms on the west. Scanning the road for helpful signs I found one offering “Goats for Sell,” an advertisement for “Hugh-Name-It Handyman,” and another offering to grind my beaver stumps.

Beaver stumps?

The sign featured a cartoon of a toothy beaver-chainsaw hybrid ravishing a tree stump. It brought to mind the undines’ fear of beaver-zombies. Perhaps this gruesome sign was the source of their fear. The Undine ran not far from Trask Road. Dory had said if I crossed the stream I’d gone too far …

Water flashed to my left and I saw a narrow, stone bridge ahead of me with an old wooden sign that said “The Undine – Best fishing in the Catskills!” above a faded painting of a gaitered fisherman pulling a speckled trout out of rushing water. I slowed and looked for a place to turn around. Just before the bridge was a driveway. I turned into it and was momentarily so blinded by the flash of sun off the water that I was forced to stop the car. I put my sun visor down and blinked into the glare. Ahead was an old white and green-trimmed farmhouse perched so close to the edge of the river that it almost looked like a boat about to set sail. Although it didn’t look like it would get very far. The old clapboards were nearly stripped of their paint and looked soft and rotten. The green shutters drooped and the porch listed to one side. The entire dilapidated structure was leaning toward the water as though yearning to cast itself into the bright rapids speeding over the rocks below.