I’m twenty-two years old. I’m on Great Barrier Island off the coast of New Zealand. It’s raining and I have not seen another person for two days. “Right now,” I write in my journal, “the tent is thrashing about as if a large man has a hold of each corner and is trying his best to shred it.”
 Sheep groan nearby. The wind builds every thirty seconds or so and makes a big pass and the tent panics, scattering drops of water across my sleeping bag.
I read, by flashlight, “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” by Alice Munro. It is anthologized in an old copy of The Story and Its Writer that I have stolen from my brother. The book is heavy, 115 stories, 1,600 pages, absurd for backpacking, but it is one of two books I have brought with me to New Zealand, and I will be here for six months, and I have decided that I want to become a writer.
It is the first Alice Munro story I’ve ever read. On the second page, I come across this:
He tells me how the Great Lakes came to be. All where Lake Huron is now, he says, used to be flat land, a wide flat plain. Then came the ice, creeping down from the North, pushing deep into the low places . . .And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gouged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went . . . The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will barely be alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown. |
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