Once seated, they close their eyes as if in meditation. I’ve witnessed this silent period from every available consciousness in the collective, and I have glints of what ran through each mind as they sat together in the dregs of sunlight: First Communion on a rainy morning; scooping black goldfish from a pond; a ringing in his ears; the sensation of landing a backflip… But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it?
Not every story needs to be told.
Tor breaks the silence with the first and only sustained utterance his guests will hear from him today. In a thin voice, he asks them to feel the presence of a higher power in the food they’ve eaten, in the land beneath them and the sky above; to feel the uniqueness of this moment of the twentieth century—to forget, briefly, the scourge of wars and apocalyptic weaponry in favor of this beauty, this peace. “Feel it, my friends,” Tor says, “and be grateful for our blessed convergence.”
A vibration seems to roll up from inside the warm earth. The sun slips behind the mountain with a click of cold, an intimation of the Pacific Ocean snarling at cliffs just a few miles west. Tim Breezely finds that his eyes are wet. He wipes them discreetly as the others begin to play their instruments, and then he gives the mandolin a tentative strum. A guitarist with a fledgling beard leads the group, along with the clarinetist, through “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” It’s a song these two know from their church growing up. They’re an older sister and younger brother, like Rolph and me.
The array of instruments and harmonizing voices has a rousing effect. Bari floats to her feet and begins to dance. The others do the same, still playing their instruments. Quinn and Ben Hobart dance together, hands vehemently clasped; Tim Breezely dances with his mandolin. All of them move and sway, together and apart, in the fading light.
Lou and Tor alone remain seated. For Lou, my father, the music and dancing provoke a riot of alarmed awareness, as if he were remembering a flame left on, a door left open, a car left running beside a cliff. With a prescience that will distinguish him to the end of his life, Lou understands that the change he’s been awaiting is now upon him. He has reached its source, can feel it in the soles of his feet. But he knows he’s too old to partake. He’s thirty-one, an old man! At the surprise thirtieth party he threw for Christine a few months back, a friend gave her a cane painted with polka dots! But Lou Kline won’t tolerate being left behind. He must catapult himself into a producer’s role, like Tor—who’s older than he is, for Christ’s sake! Not by growing grass; agriculture is too redolent of the Iowa terrain he left behind. But the music, there he can do something. He remembers the night in his cul-de-sac when everyone danced by the lake. Different dancing, different sound; the Yardbirds and their ilk have nothing to do with the life Lou Kline planned for himself, the one he’s living now. They belong to the life he’ll live next. He watches the brother-and-sister musicians and imagines them together on a stage. He thinks: I can put them there. And he does. We all know their music today.
* * *
Late that night, after Tor and Bari have gone to bed and Quinn and Ben Hobart have disappeared to parts unknown and some others have returned to the cleared land to make a bonfire （fire danger being a threat even then）， Lou and Tim Breezely and the sibling musicians and their young friends descend the mountain to the river for a night swim. Lou leads—he is always drawn to water. He goes barefoot, a big improvement over his oxfords and downright sensuous on this carpet of velvety decay, as if sharp objects don’t exist.
The river is smooth and still, pressed between walls of redwoods and so cold that their fingers throb when they dip them in. Could it harm them to submerge? Lou has heard of very cold water causing heart attacks, and feels responsible, having led everyone here. As they’re mulling over the safety of swimming, Tim Breezely suddenly strips off his clothes and dives from a log, buck-naked. The smash of cold stops his breathing; he has a brief blackout sensation of death. But when he surfaces, howling, what’s died is his gloom—he’s left it on the river bottom. Freedom! Joy! Tim Breezely will soon divorce—they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault. Tim Breezely will become a dedicated jogger before anyone jogs who isn’t being chased. He’ll write books about exercise and mental health that will make him a household name, and will receive thousands of letters from people whose lives he has transformed, even saved.