a summer afternoon in the year of … 1898? Perhaps 1902? 1907? Doesn’t matter. This is a period when all time seems the same, as if time had stopped. This is a time the old-timers remember as a kind of golden age. It is the Land of Ago, the Kingdom of When-I-Was-a-Boy. The sun washes everything with the fine gold light of endless late July; the lake is as blue as a dream, netted with a billion sparks of reflected light. And The Street! It is as smoothly grassed as a lawn and as broad as a boulevard. It is a boulevard, I see, a place where the community fully realizes itself. It is the main conduit of communication, the chief cable in a township criss-crossed with them. I’d felt the existence of these cables all along—even when Jo was alive I felt them under the surface, and here is their point of origin. Folks promenade on The Street, all up and down the east side of Dark Score Lake they promenade in little groups, laughing and conversing under a cloud-stacked summer sky, and this is where the cables all begin. I look and realize how wrong I have been to think of them as Martians, as cruel and calculating aliens. East of their sunny promenade looms the darkness of the woods, glades and hollows where any miserable thing may await, from a foot lopped off in a logging accident to a birth gone wrong and a young mother dead before the doctor can arrive from Castle Rock in his buggy. These are people with no electricity, no phones, no County Rescue Unit, no one to rely upon but each other and a God some of them have already begun to mistrust. They live in the woods and the shadows of the woods, but on fine summer afternoons they come to the edge of the lake. They come to The Street and look in each other’s faces and laugh together and then they are truly on the TR—in what I have come to think of as the zone. They are not Martians; they are little lives dwelling on the edge of the dark, that’s all.
Source: Bag of Bones ▫𓂃