Chapter Four #2
Actually, Miles had not been reading The New Yorker.
Miles had been reading Kidz Newz!, which Wesley received as a subscription.
Miles loved Kidz Newz!; Kate loved Kidz Newz!
; Kidz Newz! was an ingenious work of journalism that accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of finding good news from around the world to balance against the bad.
Ever since the depth of the pandemic it was Miles’s preferred source of information.
Who wouldn’t want to read about the accomplishments of a young gymnast, or a new monument in Uruguay, or a historic Chinese light-show?
Even the environmental column, called “Good Times…Bad Times,” tempered the world’s unfolding calamities with a compensatory optimism, often consisting of the birth of a single animal, in captivity.
Good Times for Plants That Spread by Fire.
Good Times for Algal Blooms. Good Times for Penny the Parrot at the Cleveland Zoo, who just gave birth to a super-cute baby parrot, naming contest on page 24.
Bad Times for Arizona. Bad Times for Water. Bad Times for Other Birds.
But he put Kidz Newz! under his pillow and went out to mend his father-daughter bond.
Fortunately for Coleridge, Coleridge had only one person on business from Porlock, whereas, back in California, Miles had a sourdough recipe from Porlock, a sickly-looking cactus from Porlock that needed repotting urgently, a combination lock from Porlock whose code had been forgotten and might be needed in the future.
Giuseppe was definitely from Porlock, so very definitely from Porlock that Miles didn’t need to invoke any more Porlockian visitors, not with a dog demanding to be walked, to be petted, to be fed. You’d think that a dog would tire of such attention, but he never tired, it was a drug.
—
Among the bounty of pamphlets that Miles had collected from the immaculate rack in the Visitors’ Bureau was one for the Greensbury Land Conservancy, a local nonprofit.
He had signed up immediately for their email list, and received a personalized welcome from the director, Serena Rubin, Ph.D.
It was a long note, and, to be honest, a little coquettish, and Miles imagined that the lonely biologist, marooned at her quiet backwoods organization, might have even given him a little google and found his university photo, taken under conditions of lighting never repeated, which had preserved him, for digital eternity, with a smoldering, almost postcoital gaze.
She couldn’t wait to see him! Well, he thought, there was no harm in writing that he couldn’t wait to see her, too!
Adding—for it was best to manage expectations—both he and his wife.
In addition to managing their ample forest holdings, the GLC ran an afterschool program for children, and a veritable cornucopia of walks, talks, birdwatching trips, firefly viewings, foraging tutorials, and local-history lectures.
Among the highlights was their Autumn Ramble, led annually by a professional guide from Whisperbrook, a famed thousand-bucks-a-night wellness resort with its own helipad, vitamin C showers, heated mahogany floors, and dozens of other ecological amenities.
That year, the walk was to be held at the GLC’s Claymore Preserve, a forest of five hundred acres, donated to the Conservancy by a family who had deforested much of the area in the nineteenth century to power the forges of a sleigh factory.
Apparently—Miles learned, one afternoon when he settled down to read some Russian-folklore theory—this factory was the real deal.
If you were an American child in the 1870s, and you liked sleighing, then it was more likely than not that it was on a Greensbury sleigh, famous for their light frames, their speed, their maneuverability, and then, after a single catastrophic Christmas Day in 1902, the shoddiness of their rivets, which, as temperatures dropped, cracked, almost in synchrony.
Look carefully at any memoir from the time, and you can usually find mention of “the day the sleighs failed.” In Bennington, children at the annual town celebration suddenly found themselves speeding down on boards liberated from their runners, lovers at the “Sleigh-Lock” in Brattleboro went tumbling head over heels, and the snow princess at the Greensbury Winter Festival was gravely injured by her ice scepter.
The factory hadn’t recovered, but the mill still hung, precipitously, at the edge of the Greensbury River, shedding bricks with each nor’easter.
Since then, it had been a sawmill, a button manufacturer, a hula-hoop-and-fly-swatter factory, and, more recently, a modern art museum, where whimsical installations sat against the gritty backdrop of industrial decline.
Indeed, the Krzelewski-Petrosians had already spent an afternoon there, passing from a traveling retrospective on a nineteenth-century nature painter, set to a soundtrack of extinct New England bird songs; to the summer blockbuster “Grandma Moses as You’ve Never Seen Her”; to a live work of performance art entitled Modern Humiliations, which, though it sounded like S&M, in fact featured a long-suffering artist engaging in public acts of consumer capitalism, such as trying to dispute an insurance charge, reverse an error at a credit bureau, or understand a cellphone contract.
This last piece was quite powerful—the man was thin and hollow-eyed, and in an installment called “The Next Available Representative,” he pleaded “Let me speak with a human!” to an automated voice, with such palpable anguish that Miles reached instinctively for Olive.
Indeed, the whole thing landed a bit too close to the techno-dehumanized future that woke Kate and Miles in the middle of the night, making the innocent offerings of the Greensbury Land Conservancy even more attractive.
And Miles was particularly eager to learn about Claymore, the eastern corner of which abutted Farm Road across the street from Rumphius’s house.
The walk was open only to the first twenty people who responded children included.
So Miles moved swiftly, got the last three spots, and decided to risk it.
They’d sneak Olive in. Serena Rubin, Ph.D.
, who posed on the website cheek to cheek with a koala, seemed hardly the type to make a nine-year-old wait in the car.
—
A light mist was falling when the motley group of hikers gathered behind the old Claymore Preserve that weekend.
Serena Rubin, who gave no sign of recognizing Miles, introduced herself briefly and then turned it over to the naturalist-leader, Hugh, a burly man with a long ponytail beneath his Indiana Jones hat and a knife strapped to his belt.
Miles’s heart quickened—could this be a real country person?
Despite the brisk weather, Hugh wore short shorts, real tighties that clung to his hairy thighs, pink and creamy with sunscreen.
He carried an alpenstock with a leather strap, and had a beleaguered little collie who sat untethered at his feet, though the trail signs explicitly banned dogs.
Apparently, Hugh was the kind of man who begins most interactions with an establishment of his credentials, which in this case seemed a little overkill for a nature walk, but who wouldn’t be comforted to be in the care of someone who not only was a famed tracker, but had spent the last ten years taking care of the exigent guests of Whisperbrook, multimillionaires, multibillionaires, celebrities?
In fact, he confided to the group of regular human beings, he wasn’t supposed to tell them, but, just the week before, he’d led a private walk for a particularly famous couple, both really, really famous musicians, perhaps the most famous musicians out there, such generous tippers, good people even though they were so famous, with three sweet little kids.
Just to be clear that tipping wasn’t necessary on the Autumn Ramble, said Serena Rubin.
Hugh ignored her. For a moment, it seemed as if he might move on to talk about a different topic, but no. It had been such a great hike, he said, reminiscing. Deep down, we’re all the same, he said. Even the really, really famous are just like everybody else.
A young woman with a child in a backpack carrier raised her hand.
“Yes?” said Hugh.
“Was it Beyoncé and Jay-Z?” she asked.
Hugh paused and let the tension build. Well, he wasn’t really supposed to say, but yes.
The gathered hikers all exchanged thrilled looks at this unexpected turn.
A young man, there with his wife in matching flannel, asked what Beyoncé was wearing.
Hugh really, truly wasn’t supposed to talk about his clients, and Hugh didn’t pay much attention to fashion, but if the Autumn Ramblers could keep a secret, Beyoncé might just have been wearing a Patagonia Gore-Tex rain jacket over a red merino cardigan with mother-of-pearl buttons, a pair of blue jeans—Stella McCartney—with embroidered highlights, a purple felt cowboy hat to keep off the rain, and high-top Merrell hiking boots, which, because she hadn’t broken them in, had given her blisters, an issue given her upcoming tour.
Fortunately, he always came supplied with moleskin. And he reached into his fanny pack and took out a sheet of Dr. Scholl’s with two conspicuous ovals cut in the middle.
“Is that the moleskin that was used for Beyoncé?” asked an elderly man who had introduced himself as dean of the college.
Well, again, Hugh really wasn’t supposed to talk about his celebrity clients, but in fact it was the very same moleskin that she’d used.
“The same one?” asked someone else. “Or the same type?”
“The same one,” said Hugh.
Murmurs passed through the crowd. They gathered closer to look, though Hugh, it was clear, was not handing it over.
Over the next five minutes, the hikers learned: