Outside the town it got rural again and he decided to walk the trails to Poe’s house instead of taking the road. He climbed steadily along. He knew the woods as well as an old poacher, kept notebooks of drawings he’d made of birds and other animals, though mostly it was birds. Half the weight of his pack was notebooks. He liked being outside. He wondered if that was because there were no people, but he hoped not. It was lucky growing up in a place like this because in a city, he didn’t know, his mind was like a train where you couldn’t control the speed. Give it a track and direction or it cracks up. The human condition put names to everything: bloodroot rockflower whip- poor- will, tulip bitternut hack-berry Shagbark and pin oak. Locust and king nut. Plenty to keep your mind busy.

Meanwhile, right over your head, a thin blue sky, see clear to outer space: the last great mystery. Same distance to Pittsburgh—couple miles of air and then four hundred below zero, a fragile blanket. Pure luck. Odds are you shouldn’t be alive—think about that, Watson. Can’t say it in public or they’ll put you in a straitjacket.

Except eventually the luck runs out—your sun turns into a red giant and the earth is burned whole. Giveth and taketh away. The entire human race would have to move before that happened and only the physicists could figure out how, they were the ones who would save people. Of course by then he’d be long dead. But at least he’d have made his contribution. Being dead didn’t excuse your responsibility to the ones still alive. If there was anything he was sure of, it was that.

Poe lived at the top of a dirt road in a doublewide trailer that sat, like many houses outside town, on a large tract of woodland. Eighty acres, in this case, a frontier sort of feeling, a feeling of being the last man on earth, protected by all the green hills and hollows.