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whatever calamities the world might bring them.
    And that’s why it was such a blow to him when, some ten months after they’d started on this dream together, she came to him out of the blue and surrendered. She was taking their six-year-old son, Jacob, with her back totown, where the burdens were more civilized and could be blotted out with television and pills.
    She told him he was losing his mind, that he was putting the family in jeopardy, all for some paranoid assumption that civilization was sliding into a new dark age. He saw the opposite—society had lost its mind and he was only protecting his loved ones from the ramifications—and he couldn’t believe they’d become so diametrically opposed over something so obvious to him. He tried to convince her to leave the boy, who had taken a shine to country living and had adopted a puppy and had only just begun to explore the wilderness, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
    Perhaps his greatest mistake was letting them go, but at the time he was too encumbered to chase them. Bills were pouring in, the summer harvest had to be gathered and sold. Before he ate them all, there were chickens to tend. The orchard had to be planted by fall. The cold frames and greenhouse for next winter’s crops wouldn’t build themselves. He knew his wife and child would be safe in town with her father, a retired professor with a large house to himself, and that they’d return once the hard foundation work was complete.
    As the season wore on, the sky refused to rain; insects seized the crops. He overcompensated with heavy irrigation, which invited mold and rot and disease into his beds. What didn’t die, the deer and squirrels and other woodland menaces devoured.
    Many days he struggled to remember why he’d started any of this in the first place, and then other days he managed to pump himself up, feeling rather like some tobacco-road Job who would be redeemed only through suffering and whose rewards would be congruent to that which he could bear.
    Then came the August rains, which were surely nature’s ploy to finish him. The Tockawah overran its banks and engulfed his property, bringing with it all the leaves and limbs and fallen trees from the nearby woods, loads of detritus from upriver too. A turd in the compost was a speck compared to what the Tockawah shat out over his crops, making a lake of his field and a mockery of his attempts to do good by the blessed earth.
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    And so, finally, this is where ambition had wrung him out—a lonesome little man in a toy boat, bobbing around his mud puddle. It was all in the world he still possessed, and even this, a brief illusion of lakefront property, was retreating daily by the foot, leaving only a stretch of black goop and a band of rotten grass and cane and brush that grew wider every day, hemming him in like razor wire.
    He glided along the shrinking margins of his field and snapped photos. He rowed in and out of the rusted armatures of his watermelon forest, under the monkey-bar trellis for his stalled pea vines. It was difficult to imagine what had attracted him to this work in the first place. It seemed nothing would ever grow here again.
    But then, in the lump of collapsed mud that was once his ziggurat herb garden, he noticed basil sprouts and remembered that life stubbornly returns every time. Maybe he was no Job after all but instead Noah, the tormented visionary who’d ridden out the flood while the scourge of history was washed away. What if the river had not destroyed his land but wiped clean the old mistakes and deposited a whale-load of rich, free fertilizer—all the river soil and fish meal and rotting plants that make a nice compost—for next season’s cultivation?
    As he knew so well from his science, civilizations throughout time—in fact, every form of life on the planet—were perpetuated by this cycle of decay and regrowth. It was only his impatience, the