Out on the floodplain only one field lay fallow. No tractors tilled, no irrigators turned. Its corner met the road where the road elbowed east to reach along the river.
Had I, in a late sidelong glance, seen deer upon it? I stopped pedaling to turn around, squeezing between the fences. The ground was dry, the tilling rows barely evident. The area had flooded eight years before. Yet something had kept the weeds down.
Power lines overhead, grass growing chest-high around the posts, a line I walked. I looked left and right, out to horizons of smokestacks and forest. In the hills across the river, I could just make out lookout point, where the junior high kids all rev the engines of their first cars. I listen for the buzz of electricity, distant interstate traffic, and the insects and birds, always seeking.
No, there had never been any deer. Yet I was out there anyway, jacking around. My presence there felt conspicuous, but so did the place itself - almost like it was no place at all. To be wracked by flood or drought - these were on checklists. But this was different. Had the soil been fucked? That nothing was growing might have seemed ominous, but I wondered if it were the other way around. Maybe greatness was coming. Maybe I was witnessing a preparation for the heretofore unfathomable.
