CHAPTER EIGHT
The train swept past shores where the land kept an uneasy truce with the water, betrayed when storms came. The people who lived along these shores, the ones who lived in cottages and small houses with big picture windows facing the ocean, or sat on front porches facing the estuary, read the water like gamblers read a racing sheet, they watched the water every season, watched the rain and the snow splatter on it, watched the ducks come back in the spring and listened for the frogs. The train went through farm lands, through cities and small towns, through malls and shopping centers, crisscrossing highways, none of it there a half century ago, the text of every country built into the boundaries between town and suburb, suburb and farmland, farmland and mall. The train stopped
