Chapter 58: Jim Catskills — 1985 The Love Song of the Mole Cricket

Summer in the Onteoras: the days long and warm, the air humming with insects. Squirrels dangle from branches trying to steal seeds from the bird feeders that Jim has hung from the pines around his porch. The steep mountains surrounding his cottage are carpeted with flowers and shaded by alder, aspen and beech.

“The hills are still beautiful,” Jim hears a voice in the wind say. “The woods still lovely, but I wish you could have seen this forest in the early 1800’s. Giant hemlocks, one-hundred feet tall, covered these ridges like spirits of the earth made manifest.

“It was the kind of place that made you feel that clearest path to understanding is through a primal wilderness. It’s wasn’t so much the beauty or the peace that cleansed the heart, as that subtle something, that quality of air that emanations from ancient trees, that transformed and renewed the soul.