{"product_id":"crossing-to-safety-isbn-9780375759314","title":"Crossing to Safety","description":"\u003cb\u003eIntroduction by Terry Tempest Williams\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eAfterword by T. H. Watkins\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety\u003c\/i\u003e has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eTerry Tempest Williams\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of many books, including \u003ci\u003eRefuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Finding Beauty in a Broken World\u003c\/i\u003e. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction, she lives in southern Utah.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eT. H. Watkins\u003c\/b\u003e (1936–2000) was the first Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University, and was the author of twenty-eight books.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like  a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation:  every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from  before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is obviously very early. The light is no more than dusk that leaks past the edges  of the blinds. But I see, or remember, or both, the uncurtained windows, the bare  rafters, the board walls with nothing on them except a calendar that I think was  here the last time we were, eight years ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What used to be aggressively spartan  is shabby now. Nothing has been refreshed or added since Charity and Sid turned the  compound over to the children. I should feel as if I were waking up in some Ma-and-Pa  motel in hard-times country, but I don’t. I have spent too many good days and nights  in this cottage to be depressed by it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There is even, as my eyes make better use  of the dusk and I lift my head off the pillow to look around, something marvelously  reassuring about the room, a warmth even in the gloom. Associations, probably, but  also color. The unfinished pine of the walls and ceilings has mellowed, over the  years, to a rich honey color, as if stained by the warmth of the people who built  it into a shelter for their friends. I take it as an omen; and though I remind myself  why we are here, I can’t shake the sense of loved familiarity into which I just awoke.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The air is as familiar as the room. Standard summer-cottage taint of mice, plus  a faint, not-unpleasant remembrance of skunks under the house, but around and through  those a keenness as of seven thousand feet. Illusion, of course. What smells like  altitude is latitude. Canada is only a dozen miles north, and the ice sheet that  left its tracks all over this region has not gone for good, but only withdrawn. Something  in the air, even in August, says it will be back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In fact, if you could forget mortality,  and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that  time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving.  Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually  exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological  or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t  differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we  build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than  coral reefs. Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and  present can hardly be told from past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sally is still sleeping. I slide out of bed  and go barefooted across the cold wooden floor. The calendar, as I pass it, insists  that it is not the one I remember. It says, accurately, that it is 1972, and that  the month is August.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The door creaks as I ease it open. Keen air, gray light, gray  lake below, gray sky through the hemlocks whose tops reach well above the porch.  More than once, in summers past, Sid and I cut down some of those weedlike trees  to let more light into the guest cottage. All we did was destroy some individuals,  we never discouraged the species. The hemlocks like this steep shore. Like other  species, they hang on to their territory.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I come back in and get my clothes off  a chair, the same clothes I wore from New Mexico, and dress. Sally sleeps on, used  up by the long flight and the five-hour drive up from Boston. Too hard a day for  her, but she wouldn’t hear of breaking the trip. Having been summoned, she would  come.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e For a minute I stand listening to her breathing, wondering if I dare go out  and leave her. But she is deeply asleep, and should stay that way for a while. No  one is going to be coming around at this hour. This early piece of the morning is  mine. Tiptoeing, I go out onto the porch and stand exposed to what, for all my senses  can tell me, might as well be 1938 as 1972.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e No one is up in the Lang compound. No  lights through the trees, no smell of kindling smoke on the air. I go out the spongy  woods path past the woodshed and into the road, and there I meet the sky, faintly  brightening in the east, and the morning star as steady as a lamp. Down under the  hemlocks I thought it overcast, but out here I see the bowl of the sky pale and spotless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My feet take me up the road to the gate, and through it. Just inside the gate the  road forks. I ignore the Ridge House road and choose instead the narrow dirt road  that climbs around the hill to the right. John Wightman, whose cottage sits at the  end of it, died fifteen years ago. He will not be up to protest my walking in his  ruts. It is a road I have walked hundreds of times, a lovely lost tunnel through  the trees, busy this morning with birds and little shy rustling things, my favorite  road anywhere.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and  when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders. Through  the hardwoods along the foot of the hill, through the belt of cedars where the ground  is swampy with springs, through the spruce and balsam of the steep pitch, I go alertly,  feasting my eyes. I see coon tracks, an adult and two young, in the mud, and maturing  grasses bent like croquet wickets with wet, and spotted orange Amanitas, at this  season flattened or even concave and holding water, and miniature forests of club  moss and ground pine and ground cedar. There are brown caves of shelter, mouse and  hare country, under the wide skirts of spruce.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e My feet are wet. Off in the woods  I hear a Peabody bird tentatively try out a song he seems to have half forgotten.  I look to the left, up the slope of the hill, to see if I can catch a glimpse of  Ridge House, but see only trees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and  there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its  edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I  watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e We didn’t come back  to Battell Pond this time for pleasure. We came out of affection and family solidarity,  as adopted members of the clan, and because we were asked for and expected. But I  can’t feel somber now, any more than I could when I awoke in the shabby old guest  cottage. Quite the reverse. I wonder if I have ever felt more alive, more competent  in my mind and more at ease with myself and my world, than I feel for a few minutes  on the shoulder of that known hill while I watch the sun climb powerfully and confidently  and see below me the unchanged village, the lake like a pool of mercury, the varying  greens of hayfields and meadows and sugarbush and black spruce woods, all of it lifting  and warming as the stretched shadows shorten.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There it was, there it is, the place  where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its  headquarters.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I come in I find Sally sitting up, the blind closest to the bed—the  one she can reach—raised to let a streak of sun into the room. She is drinking a  cup of coffee from the thermos and eating a banana from the fruit basket that Hallie  left when she put us to bed last night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Not breakfast,” Hallie said. “Just hazari.  We’ll come and get you for brunch, but we won’t come too early. You’ll be tired and  off your clock. So sleep in, and we’ll come and get you about ten. After brunch we’ ll go up and see Mom, and later in the afternoon she’s planned a picnic on Folsom  Hill.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A picnic?” Sally said. “Is she well enough to go on a picnic? If she’s doing  it for us, she shouldn’t.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “That’s the way she’s arranged it,” Hallie said. “She  said you’d be tired, and to let you rest, and if she says you’ll be tired, you might  as well be tired. If she plans a picnic, you’d better want a picnic. No, she’ll be  all right. She saves her strength for the things that matter to her. She wants it  like old times.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I let up the other two blinds and lighten the dim room. “Where’d you go?” Sally asks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Up the old Wightman road.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I pour myself coffee and sit  down in the wicker chair that I remember as part of the furniture of the Ark. From  the bed Sally watches me. “How was it?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Beautiful. Quiet. Good earthy smells. It  hasn’t changed.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I wish I could have been along.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I’ll take you up later in the  car.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No, we’ll be going up to the picnic, that’s enough.” She sips her coffee,  watching me over the rim of the cup. “Isn’t it typical? At death’s door, and she  wants it like old times, and orders everybody to make it that way. And worries about  us being tired. Ah, she’s going to leave a hole! There’s been a hole, ever since  we. . . . Did you feel any absences?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No absences. Presences.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I’m glad. I can’ t imagine this place without them in it. Both of them.”","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304906150117,"sku":"NP9780375759314","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375759314.jpg?v=1767724294","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/crossing-to-safety-isbn-9780375759314","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}