My buddy Mike Fink has a way of appearing on his own land like an elf that stepped out from a veil between the dimensions. Usually he makes a little sound when he’s about 20 feet away so he doesn’t startle me. I was camped out next to the raging stream earlier today reading The Catcher in the Rye when I heard a stick scrape rock, turned around and it was him and his ferocious cuddling dobermans Suki and Katya. Mike is an arborist and he had been out the past day and a half chain sawing trees out of the way of traffic.
The forest near the stream was pretty torn up by the flood waters that had come through the past 24 hours. Whole sections of forest floor had been picked up and moved. Mike started digging around the overturned moss and roots that were near a kind of gigantic rock. First he produced a nasty, jagged hunk of bottle glass that was washed out of the earth by the flood. Numerous beer can pull tops were scattered around. Then he found an old nickel that looked like it was made of copper. Then a moment later he turned up a subway token from the 1970s. That’s quite a distance for a little bit of metal to travel — it must have been quite a storm.