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really found one until I moved to this farm. Growing up, we lived in a federal housing project. Now I know every square foot of these 150 acres of farm; it is my island, our peace. I know where the coyotes crawl under the fence to get to the back hayfield, where recently one tried and failed to haul the leg bone of one of my neighbor’s dead cows underneath it. I know where the flock of wild turkeys scratches in the leaves of the forest around the straight red oaks looking for acorns and bugs. I have seen where springs bubble out of the ground in April after heavy rains. For the last three years a great horned owl has nested, first in a half-dead oak a hundred yards from our front porch and then in an oak thirty feet from the back door. Last spring one of the baby owls blew out of the nest into the yard; somehow it flew back. I’ve seen the spot where red-tailed hawks have killed cottontail rabbits. I know each cow and who her father was.
    When I take walks to the larger half of the farm, back to the woods, I always look toward Kedron Road and see the dream home that my ex-wife, Barbara, and I built, just a few hundred yards from where I live now. Barbara owns it now and rents it out to strangers. She lives up the road about thirty-five miles with our three children. We restored a 1901 farmhouse, added on an oak timber-frame structure, put in a hot tub, and thought it would be perfect. I found a great deal on walnut lumber at the sawmill in Culleoka, when no one wanted walnut. I had gorgeous tongue-and-groove flooring made, cheap, at some guy’s shop behind his house in Lewisburg. Part of that dream, the part with our children, has been put back together, albeit imperfectly. The other part, about Barbara and me, is focused on our children and it works well because we love them so much.
    The home Rita and I live in now is just up the hill. A ranch house that used to be owned by Jess and Mary Lou Morton, we’ve added on to it. It is painted gray, but the paint is constantly peeling. Paint just does not seem to stick to it. Jess told me he always had the same problem.
    Red and gray foxes come out at night; we sometimes see them in the fields when we’re coming home after dark. The coyotes often howl on the ridge behind us; five of them can sound like twenty, although, who knows, maybe there are twenty of them up there. As I listen to them, I wonder, do they howl to celebrate life or are they crying? I wish they would let me join them. Instead, I go to church to get my release. At the farm, for the first time in my life I can understand how someone could sit on a front porch in a rocking chair, just sit. I used to criticize people for that.
    As much as I love that piece of land and my family, lately though, I’d become too sedate, too Buddha-like, too contented. Until now.
    I rode over to Second Avenue and coasted down the hill toward the sea. I turned left, onto the bike path. When I got to the city’s skateboarding ramps, I went up and over one and glided back along Resurrection Bay. A couple local teens looked at me like “You’re too old to be doing that!” A gull glided to my right, hovering to see if two Steller’s sea lions would leave any scraps.
    I got back to Phoenix Road and turned right. It was a hard, uphill pedal; I refused to get off and walk, even though I felt like it, even in the lowest gear. Two black ravens sat in the top of a swaying spruce and made odd clucking sounds. I thought again about how we would not be here in Alaska if it hadn’t been for true friends. But here we were.
    I was riding past the orphanage, almost home, when I remembered a quote from T. E. Lawrence’s book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It rushed to me now: All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it