Spoonwood by Ernest Hebert

and ice and in the spring and fall by mud. It winds upward through a dense forest. Just about where the road ends and carries on as a hiking path and snowmobile trail, the land levels out more or less into a ten-acre saddle between the twin summits of Lonesome Hill.
    â€œHere we are, Birch,” Dad says. “A tribe of young people in the 1960s started a commune on this spot. They abandoned their land in the late 1970s, and it’s been forgot land ever since.”
    Dad parks his truck just off the road, beside a stone wall and cellar hole where a farmhouse had set maybe a hundred years ago. The stones hold many colors in an aura of deep gray. Beforeanything else, the tall trees, even the wildflowers in the clearing, the stones draw the eye. They seem more like religious objects than parts of a falling-down, no longer useful wall. I want to touch them, and I reach out. Dad seems to know what’s in my heart. He brings me over to the wall and puts my hand on a rock. It’s hot from the sun and rough as his beard. He laughs out loud, me too, and the forest laughs back, or so it seems in my memory. It is our first joyous occasion.
    Just beyond the wall, partially hidden by the trees, is an exempt yellow school bus painted in psychedelic colors and designs. A few tattered tie-dyed curtains hang in the windows. The door is gone and Dad walks in. The bus seats are gone, the inside gutted except for a clothes rack and an old dresser with the drawers open and empty, as if someone left in a hurry. On the clothes rack are half a dozen dresses on metal coat hangers brown with rust. Moths or something have eaten away parts of the dresses. On top of the rack is a bird’s nest, empty.
    â€œAmazing how nature makes beauty out of everything,” Dad says. “It’s a little mildewy, but the roof doesn’t leak—not a bad space.”
    I memorize Dad’s lyrics but do not understand them at the time and therefore do not answer.
    We walk into the clearing, where the hippies had cut down trees but had not bothered to pull the stumps. Now a decade later suckers grow out of some stumps; others lay rotting. Dad walks me to a huge raspberry patch, maybe sixty feet long and twenty feet deep. Inside is an abandoned Volkswagen Bug, the blue paint faded so that it looks as if a piece of sky has fallen into the briars. Dad spends a good twenty minutes picking raspberries and popping them in his mouth. When I complain, he crushes one between thumb and forefinger and I suck the juice from his finger.
    Scattered here and there in the woods in a circle around the clearing are rotting tent platforms, a collapsed yurt, and a rather dignified outhouse with a peace symbol drawn inside a half moon on the door. Dad finds a dug well covered with a large flat stone grown over with moss. He moves the stone and drops a rock intothe dark. It makes a splash. We will have water. In the middle of the clearing is a ring of fire-blackened stones.
    â€œWhen I was kid, Birch, Tubby and I used to sneak up here and watch from the woods, hoping to see hippie girls get naked, which they sometimes did. Everybody danced and sang to guitar music. They smoked their homegrown and held long discussions about the coming revolution. It was all going to be based on peace, love, and sharing.”
    Dad builds a campfire close to our truck, starting the fire with birch bark, building it up with dead pine branches, and adding hardwood once the fire is going well. Dad is well-equipped for camping. Inside the plywood shell in the bed of the truck is a small propane refrigerator, a cook stove, a sleeping platform, and cabinets for gear. With a bow saw he cuts maple poles and builds a tripod over the fire. He ties rope around a plastic bucket, lowers it into the well, and fills a big aluminum pot, which he centers on the fire.
    He fills a couple of bottles with canned baby formula. He is very careful, reading the directions three times. He warms the