Trailing Clouds Suzanne Paola There was a time when meadow, grove and stream Iwas born in the late 1950s. In the afterdin of the McCarthy hearings. At the start of To Tell the Truth, the unfeeling duplicate people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Into the off-camera bedroom of The Honeymooners. In a country where the dominant species periodicaUy ejected a few of its members off the surface into space. Then fished them out of the water. As ifwe were a panting spaniel of a species using ourselves as baUs. As if we were bored. We'd dropped two bombs in a place far away and turned two cities into what looked from the air Uke two mouths fuU ofserrated teeth. That was far away and hard to fathom so we decided to make the same beautiful noises at home, in steel drums surrounded by streams, and use the heat to boü water and light lights. We buüt highways then, a big bitumen Tick-Tack-Toe that has taken over much of the work of our raptors—hawks, kestrels, eagles, etc.—plump indolent birds now rather than the gaunt kenning things nature made, who wait beside us for the things we flatten. Endangered red-taüed hawks stud the highways . Ditto for bald eagles. We wipe out the many and richly stuff the few. As if we were bored. It seems we're the only creature that creates such diversions for itself. When my Boxili grandfather was a young man, aWest Indian immigrant, he came down to the New Jersey shore and grabbed a piece ofland on the edge ofBarnegat Bay and squatted on it, and so it became his. He lived in a tent I think. The land was between a lagoon that exhaled a steam of mosquitoes , and the bay, which then I imagine was clean. There was nothing 117 118Fourth Genre there, no other houses or paved roads or power Unes. Cattaüs fanned up wherever you did not aggressively scythe them down. Whipsharp beach grass. Scrub pines. This was near a part ofNewJersey caUed the Pine Barrens, home of a fabulous kiUing creature caUed the Jersey Devü, a thing with bat wings and claws and a horseUke head. Back then, just afterWorldWar I, it was important to people in America that land be owned. In many places you could just go and take land and people would say, with a certain measure of reUef, that it was yours, you owned it. Ifyou were wiUing to live on it for a whüe. My grandfather roUed himself up and slept, in the malarial music. He built a house on this property, buüding it himself with his nephew Kenneth, a house like Samuel Johnson's preaching woman: not that it was done well but that it was done at all. ... It had no electricity or hot water or furnace, just a wood stove and cold water from a weU they dug. A foamgreen rickety structure buUt up on pilings, a humorless grin ofa front porch. As far as I am concerned being a child happened there. Everything else was seeping adulthood. My grandfather and his nephew built a second smaller bungalow. We caUed the two the Big House and the Little Cottage or, together, the bungalows . The Little Cottage was just two smaU bedrooms and a toüet, while the Big House had two bedrooms, a sleeping porch, a tiny kitchen, and a living room/dining area. By common consent, until bedtime, the Little Cottage belonged to the chüdren. We kept a ladder propped against its side and spent a lot of time crawling around on its almost-flat roof. The moon hung over us, grau of the '60s, the blood cup in space. At a bar across the bay we watched the probes land on the moon and Edward White bobbing on his sUck umbihcus. The inside of the houses hung almost out oftime. Cabbage rose walls. Kerosene lamps, cold water, sinks and toilets only. PotbeUied wood stove that leaked oüy smoke from its closed mouth. Life, Jackie K. with her UFO hats. Valley of the Dolls. A teeny almost-toy oven...