only check you’ve got against them. That’s the only way you can ensure moral responsibility in this society. Make it cheaper.
So that winter morning when I picked up the paper and read about this terrible event in a small town upstate, with all those kids lost, I knew instantly what the story was; I knew at once that it wasn’t an accident at all. There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does. I knew that some body somewhere had made a decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies, and now the state or the manufacturer of the bus or the town, somebody, was busy lining up a troop of smoothies to negotiate with a bunch of grief stricken bumpkins a settlement that wouldn’t displease the accountants. I packed a bag and headed north, like I said, pissed off.
Sam Dent is a pretty town, actually. It’s not Aspen or Vail, maybe, and it sure isn’t Saint Bart’s or Mustique, where frankly I’d much rather have been at that time of year, but the landscape was attractive and strangely stirring. I’m not a scenery freak like my ex wife, Klara, who has orgasms over sunsets and waterfalls and not much else, but once in a great while I go someplace and look up and see where I am, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful to me: my stomach tightens, and my pulse races, and this powerful blend of fear and excitement comes over me, like something dangerous is about to happen. It’s almost sexual.
Anyhow, the town of Sam Dent and the mountains and forests that surrounded it, they gave me that feeling. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and have spent my entire adult life in New York City. I’m an urban animal, basically; I care more about people than landscape. And although I have sojourned in rural parts quite a bit (I’ve spent months at a time in Wounded Knee, in eastern Washington, in Alabama, where I won a big asbestosis case, in the coal mining region of West Virginia, and so on), I can’t say the landscape of those places particularly moved me. They were places, that’s all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet.
Yes, I needed to learn a whole lot about each of them in order to pursue my case effectively, but in those other cases 92 he Sweet Hereafter my interest in the landscape was more pragmatic, you might say, than personal. Strictly professional.
Here in Sam Dent, however, it somehow got personal.
It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea you feel like you’re reading one of those great long novels by whatsername, Joyce Carol Oates, or Theodore Dreiser, that make you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you ve dealt with before.
It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.
They have these huge trees everywhere, on the mountains, of course, but down in the valleys and in town, too, and surrounding the houses, even outside my motel room; they’ve got white pine and spruce and hemlock and birches thick as a man, and the wind blows through them constantly.
And since there’s very little noise of any other kind up there almost no people, remember, and few cars, no sirens howling, no jackhammers slamming, and so forth the thing you hear most is the wind blowing in the trees.
From September to June, the wind comes roaring out of Ontario all the way from Saskatchewan or someplace weird like that, steady and hard and cold, with nothing to stop or slow it until it hits these mountains and the trees, which, like I say, are everywhere.
What they call the Adirondack Park, you understand, is no small roadside park, no cutesy little campground with public toilets and showers I mean, we’re talking six million acres of woods, mountains, and lakes, we’re talking a region the size of the state of Vermont, the biggest damn park in
So that winter morning when I picked up the paper and read about this terrible event in a small town upstate, with all those kids lost, I knew instantly what the story was; I knew at once that it wasn’t an accident at all. There are no accidents. I don’t even know what the word means, and I never trust anyone who says he does. I knew that some body somewhere had made a decision to cut a corner in order to save a few pennies, and now the state or the manufacturer of the bus or the town, somebody, was busy lining up a troop of smoothies to negotiate with a bunch of grief stricken bumpkins a settlement that wouldn’t displease the accountants. I packed a bag and headed north, like I said, pissed off.
Sam Dent is a pretty town, actually. It’s not Aspen or Vail, maybe, and it sure isn’t Saint Bart’s or Mustique, where frankly I’d much rather have been at that time of year, but the landscape was attractive and strangely stirring. I’m not a scenery freak like my ex wife, Klara, who has orgasms over sunsets and waterfalls and not much else, but once in a great while I go someplace and look up and see where I am, and it’s unexpectedly beautiful to me: my stomach tightens, and my pulse races, and this powerful blend of fear and excitement comes over me, like something dangerous is about to happen. It’s almost sexual.
Anyhow, the town of Sam Dent and the mountains and forests that surrounded it, they gave me that feeling. I grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, and have spent my entire adult life in New York City. I’m an urban animal, basically; I care more about people than landscape. And although I have sojourned in rural parts quite a bit (I’ve spent months at a time in Wounded Knee, in eastern Washington, in Alabama, where I won a big asbestosis case, in the coal mining region of West Virginia, and so on), I can’t say the landscape of those places particularly moved me. They were places, that’s all. Interchangeable chunks of the planet.
Yes, I needed to learn a whole lot about each of them in order to pursue my case effectively, but in those other cases 92 he Sweet Hereafter my interest in the landscape was more pragmatic, you might say, than personal. Strictly professional.
Here in Sam Dent, however, it somehow got personal.
It’s dark up there, closed in by mountains of shadow and a blanketing early nightfall, but at the same time the space is huge, endless, almost like being at sea you feel like you’re reading one of those great long novels by whatsername, Joyce Carol Oates, or Theodore Dreiser, that make you feel simultaneously surrounded by the darkness and released into a world much larger than any you ve dealt with before.
It’s a landscape that controls you, sits you down and says, Shut up, pal, I’m in charge here.
They have these huge trees everywhere, on the mountains, of course, but down in the valleys and in town, too, and surrounding the houses, even outside my motel room; they’ve got white pine and spruce and hemlock and birches thick as a man, and the wind blows through them constantly.
And since there’s very little noise of any other kind up there almost no people, remember, and few cars, no sirens howling, no jackhammers slamming, and so forth the thing you hear most is the wind blowing in the trees.
From September to June, the wind comes roaring out of Ontario all the way from Saskatchewan or someplace weird like that, steady and hard and cold, with nothing to stop or slow it until it hits these mountains and the trees, which, like I say, are everywhere.
What they call the Adirondack Park, you understand, is no small roadside park, no cutesy little campground with public toilets and showers I mean, we’re talking six million acres of woods, mountains, and lakes, we’re talking a region the size of the state of Vermont, the biggest damn park in
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