Such were my thoughts when I rolled my bicycled up the path of the Bog Turtle Ecostery to where Gronigen stood, welcome, always welcoming, broom in hand.  A fortnight had passed since I’d seen him last and with little snowfall where I live but here in the hills—not the rooftop of the world but maybe its attic—everything was still white, and as such full of possibility.  As he watched me approach Gronigen held his broom at half mast, poised for adventure.

“What’s new in the world of tracks?” I asked by way of greeting.

“Everything, everything.”  He surveyed the horizon.  “Well, the coyotes in particular have been making their presence felt hereabouts.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He smiled and leaned his head a little to one side, unsurprised by my appearance.  He asked me about my ride and then explained, while scrutinizing the cloudy sky, how he himself was leaving soon for a journey along the old Catskill Turnpike.  It would take over a month and he would get to stay at a dozen stations like this old farmhouse that were located along the old road (sometimes following current highways, sometimes reverting to smaller byways) every twenty-five miles or so.

This year was the first where they had enough stations—call them hostels, lodgings, ecosteries, what you will—off the carbuncular grid to enable a bicycle journey from Vermont to the Finger Lakes.  In the winter, even.  He’d been working toward this for a decade, bringing people together and inspiring them to see beyond the end of their fenders, to give up the tailpipe dream that claimed a god-given right of 2.5 cars per family.  To simply share.  To be hospitable.  “But you know about that already, what we’re up against.”  He all but called me comrade.

I was quiet.  I didn’t wish to disappoint him by honoring the truth—that my devout bicycling was more accident than design, more poverty-induced pragmatics than a Gandhian gesture to change the world.  Of course I preferred bicycles to cars, aesthetically and I might even say ethically, and as such I lived at a certain oblique angle to the rest of America, but I held no romance that therein lay salvation.

“Have you been training for your journey?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.  Every morning the roads are clear Bronwen and I take our bikes out and retrace the roads around us.  She’s so disappointed she’s not coming.  Poor child.  But next time, next time.”

I explained that I had a gift for Bronwen—or, at least, a gesture of customer servitude.  Perhaps it had been forward of me, but I took her letter as a kind of summons—or, at least, a hint by the universe, whose stars and constellations only speak in hints.   After her letter I got right to work and bicycled to the bookstore in town where by luck they had a copy of Mumford’s tome that had so offended the girl.  I paid for it with some of my store credit and then back home wrote to Bronwen explaining I would deliver a replacement copy in a week.  This copy I bought was clean of any markings, so I turned to page one and with pencil in hand embarked on my own marginal commentary.  It took me a week to fill it from endpaper to endpaper.

Gronigen seemed to understand perfectly.  “I’m sure she will be aglow with gratitude for your conscientiousness.  I’m surprised by how she’s taken to Mumford—that old stalwart can inspire still!”

He gestured toward the farmhouse and we headed that way—and how I was looking forward to another cup of tea around their blazing fire!  Just before we arrived at the door, though, Gronigen leaned down toward a shallow stone bowl sitting next to the path.  It was filled with sunflower seeds.   With a mischievous grin—as though testing my faith—he scooped up a handful and tossed them over his head.  The seeds fell like a dash of black sparks against the snowy stone path and instantly hailed a flock of squawking starlings, all iridescent, a full convergence of them, like something shattered suddenly reassembled.  Dozens of birds, like stars falling, suddenly there, milling along the path and picking at seeds.  Where had they come from?  How do you train two score starlings so?  I shivered with incredulity.  A seed landed on my shoe and a bird followed it there.  I had to resist the urge to kick it away, an urge stirred not by the bird itself but what it represented, a wild confusion and perversion of things, a sort of black magic even.

“Mustn’t dawdle!” Gronigen cried out, taking the three steps to the door in a single bound.  He chortled quietly, and I suddenly feared for my sanity.

As he entered the cottage he glanced back at me and I could see the hull of a sunflower seed lodged in his teeth.

Then I googled myself and joined Gronigen among the unmapped interstices of the internet.

As I googled and googled I could see my reflection in the hallway mirror—and what a slumped slouching figure I cut!—something Beardsley or Schiele might have drawn.  I felt ashamed.

I turned off the computer, determined to think no more of bog turtles or ecosteries, dismissing what I saw in the morning as a mere luddite caprice in these new York hills, an enclave of eccentrics of no consequence to the world.

Besides, I had my own problems.  My book sales had been slumping for months, and of late I’d found myself scarcely able to pay the bills.  It was a common bookselling lot, every bookseller I knew was being driven into austerity, starved by each other and bewildered by a wildly changing market.  Soon enough the steady creep of life reasserted itself and I returned to my paltry yoga of checking email, processing and packing orders (what few there were), losing games of chess online, putting water on to boil for pasta.  And so the winter day threatened to become like countless others in my life, sinister in its dullness, as the horizon on the west tilted up and devoured the sun.

One week later, as the universe tilts, an envelope appeared in my mailbox.  It was adorned with the drawing of a wren and the sender’s name was Bronwen Brocklesby.

Just last spring some wrens built a nest inside my mailbox.  The door of the mailbox didn’t close properly, leaving just enough room for egress, otherwise nicely sheltering their young.  The birds didn’t even mind the postman’s occasional deposits.  Now I’ve had vines cover my windows, mushrooms grow in my bathroom, and raccoons colonize my attic, so birds in my mailbox was of no concern whatever.  The eggs hatched, the young fledged, and had not heard from them since—until this letter.

To speak of surprise doesn’t do my eyebrows justice.

Of course I savored the envelope before opening it—I savored it and held out as long as I could.  The line drawing of the wren was done expertly, without the care of a trace.  The script, fine, almost calligraphic, was addressed to “The Bicycling Bookseller,” capitalized and in quotation marks, thick with jest.  I turned it over and over in my hands.

Enough already! I chided myself—what are you, some stuttering lovelorn adolescent clutching his pen-pal’s latest volley?  I tore open the envelope and found a single sheet inside.  It read:

“Dear Mr Glencote—

Thank you for the books.  I am still reading them—some I like to start to read at the end and work backwards, some I start in the middle, and one or two I even start at the beginning.  However, I am writing because I would like to return one of the books.  Mumford’s The City in History.  There is no writing in it!—I thought that these books, being ‘used,’ would be well-tended, marked up as they say with notes from previous readers in the flyleaves and margins.  Your other books have at least a signature in the front, but this book is so clean it may as well be new.  What a disappointment!  Of course I could annotate it myself as I go along, but that’s not nearly as much fun.  I want to know something of the people who read the book before me.  Would you be able to find a replacement copy with some signatures and notes and marginalia?  I’m not one to speak of false advertising, but you are a used bookseller, aren’t you?  On further thought—I assumed that the used referred to the books and not yourself, so I am sorry if I was mistaken in that regard.

Bronwen B.

PS

The night after your visit Coyote ambled down our path, crisscrossing your footprints, and left a thick deposit of scat at the base of the tree where you’d leaned your bike.  Here is a rendering.”

And befitting Bronwen, a line drawing of coyote scat adorned the bottom of the page.

We walked up the snow-swept path to the farmhouse, which was a rambling old clapboard-sided home, two stories tall with steep gables, surrounded by numerous outbuildings—coops, greenhouse, garden sheds—as a chicken is surrounded by its chicks.  The roof was inlaid with solar panels and the dark coils of solar hot water system, but otherwise the place looked as though it were presiding over a homestead a century or more ago.  We passed through a mudroom by the side entrance, where we shed our boots and coats, and came into the kitchen, a long room enlivened by a roaring fire and dangling ladles and pots, the smell of baking bread in the oven, and a woman vigorously scouring pots in the sink.  She greeted us with a smile and warm hello.  She toweled her hands, brushed back her graying locks, and offered her hand to me.

Her name was Maudlin and she gestured for me to sit down at the large broad oak table, and went witout hesitation to fill the teapot.  Ah—she and Gronigen had the air of folks accustomed to a regular influx of visitors—they were unceremonious but warm and quickly attentive.

Maudlin spoke over her shoulder.  “So you’re the bookseller on wheels!  You must be like Bunyan’s Pilgrim, always in haste with a burden on thy back.”

“Well, I have panniers,” I said, “to spare my back.”  I refrained from admitting that the post office conducts, with this trip as the single exception, all my deliveries.

“Antiquarian tomes and spandex should never mix!” called out a young woman from the far end of the kitchen table.  I hadn’t noticed her till now.  She was curled up reading, holding her book as one would a hymnal, her eyes riveted on the page, though broadly chuckling to herself, no doubt at the thought of my modestly rotund person in spandex..  Her lustrous black hair, shoulder length, was tucked in under a wool hat.

“That’s Bronwen,” Gronigen said, as he handed me a mug of tea.  “Bronwen, your books have arrived.  Bronwen?  Ah!  I never have seen anyone go so suddenly and deliberately deaf.”  No further introduction needed, it seemed!

“We haven’t owned a car in a decade,” Gronigen said as he straddled the bench across the table from me.  “And we’re seven miles from town.  When we heard about hydrofracking, compulsory integration, the whole excrementous lot, we ripped out our natural gas lines.  So we go slowly, if at all, and for energy we use the sun, and the trees, which use the sun.  We huddle along in the winter.  And we use our own muscles.”

“And ligaments,” piped in Bronwen from her book.

“And ligaments,” Gronigen acknowledged.  “She’s a stickler, sometimes.”

“I just like to remind you of what you teach me.”

I said it’s sometimes downright exhausting, doing the right thing.  Gronigen shook his head in disagreement.  No, he said, if an action is done in the right spirit, with a pure mind and open heart, fatigue should rarely come into the picture.  “We all have such resources,” he said, tapping his chest, “such reserves of energy and spirit that are so rarely ever used these days.”

“Where’s the fault line?” I asked.

“Distraction,” he said, without hesitation.  I felt the truth of what he said in myself.

I unwrapped the books and slid them across the table, and Gronigen delighted in them one by one.

“Ah, yes!  Just perfect.  And excellent condition, too.  You can’t trust—well, you know, you can’t trust everyone out there.  Thank you so much!  See, Bronwen is homeschooled and she devours books and she’s just about to finish her schooling, aren’t you Bronwen?  And then what?”

In a maladroit effort to engage the aloof girl, I asked, “Off to see the world, right?”

“I’m no cosmonaut,” she replied in a wispy, junco-like tone, her eyes still on the page.  “I’d rather stay home, thank you very much.  I’d like to stay home and be…a toad herder!  Yes, that’s what I’d like.  There are enough goat herders in the world, I think we need more toad herders.  You should see these woods in July!  All the hopping about out there makes one downright paranoid.”

I didn’t know what to say to that and so said nothing.  Nonetheless, they all unaccountably raised my spirits.  Gronigen had a bristly gray beard and a visage always on the verge of a smile.  When he spoke his hands and arms would widen and his fingers would dance as though playing a piano.  He raised your wind horse, and it never ceased to inspire me to double my efforts to be pleasant, conversational, worthy of their time.

Maudlin, drying dishes, drifted back into the conversation.  “So how many books do you have to sell?”

“Round about three thousand.”

“Gronigen!  Think of it.  Three thousand author dedications.  Three thousand acknowledgments!  That’s my favorite part of books.  Most just go downhill from there.  I’m a connoisseur of dedication pages.  I have a mind to compile a book of them.  Tell me, what’s your favorite acknowledgment?”

“I really don’t know.  I can’t say I’ve given them much notice.”  Maudlin’s brow furrowed in quiet disbelief.  She leaned her head to one side and stared off into space, trying to contemplate a life without acknowledgments.

Gronigen took over the conversation and we talked bikes for a while.  He was preparing a trip through the Catskills—yes, in February snows—and he wanted to know my take on salt stains.  I told him of my experience, all the while feeling his was wider, and he asked not to humor me but because his generosity and kind humility knew no bounds.  I answered as best I could, warming in the glow of his spirit.  Why are you bicycling to the Catskills? I asked.

“Work.  By that I mean, practice.  I mean, building bridges with people I know, working for what little future we have on this planet.  To fight for the future?  Well, not exactly.  I’m not much into fighting.  Nor am I into teaching—that is, hearing myself talk.  I just focus on the work—what needs to be done.  I for one am looking forward to a life without planes—and cars.  Won’t be too long now, I suspect!  But on the whole contemplating the future just mires you in despair.  Better to carve out what we can with that sharp knife’s edge we all have call the present.”

I was invited to stay for dinner three times, and I declined three times.  Out of pure instinct, though my curiosity almost got the best of me.  Soon I was on my way home, having warmed my belly with tea and my feet against the fire in their hearth.  It was only as I left the farmhouse that I saw the sign “Bog Turtle Ecostery” hanging from an ash tree.  I wondered what that could mean, and whether it was anything more than a relic of a Luddite-inspired hippie past.  To my surprise, it was not long before I had a chance to return there and find out.

What we silly mortals do to honor a blank check.

As my resentment grew I pedaled faster and faster and found to my astonishment that I was gliding up the undulating rising road with euphoric ease—the hill was steep and the road lonely, like one from the Pyrenees, but nothing burns cleaner than the white flame of indignation and in this squall of anger and snow I cycled straight past my destination, and it was nearly half a mile down the road before I realized my mistake.

Having circled back round, I approached the mailbox of 1435 Swamp Oaks Road, and found there a man standing in the driveway. He was dressed all in wool and held a large wide broom with both hands. “Looks like you have a book delivery,” he said, smiling.

“That I do,” I replied, catching my breath. As the fog faded from my glasses I recognize the man as the same one from the booksale, Gronigen, and his calm, kindly air caused my anger to evaporate. He seemed genuinely delighted to meet me, and his delight was infectious. Later I would learn that almost everything delighted him, but it nonetheless always made me feel good, especially on a frigid January day, and I would come to always feel I could share his joy unjealously.

I stepped off my bike and began untying the package.

Gronigen demurred, softly waving his broom at me. “I bet you need some warming up. Let’s go inside and get you a cup of tea, and settle our account in there.”

I didn’t believe we had an account to settle, but tea and warmth were indeed inviting, so I gladly leaned my bike against a tree, removed the package, and followed him up the path.

The broom, he explained as we walked, was used during the Canadian Olympic trials in the 70s, in the sport of curling. Did I know what curling was? Was I a curler myself? No, I cannot say that I curled. Well! He used the broom for smoothing out this path here. Not for curling proper, you understand, but for keeping the substrate—the snow—a uniformly smooth surface one to two inches deep, perfect for registering animal tracks. In the woods, this time of year, the snow ran twelve to eighteen inches deep, and most animals had no choice but to plow along in ungainly way, and this made track identification rather difficult. It was a matter of great interest to him which animals passed by their home, and what they were up to, and this practice—smoothing out the snow each morning—was his way of staying in touch.

“Now to see what I mean,” he said, waving his broom in the air, “turn around and take a look.” And indeed we were well registered. The tracks of our boots made parallel lines, chiseled in the thin snow. His tracks carved a perfect, tidy narrow thread. How clumsy and sprawling and splayed my tracks were by comparison!—with each step my toes coughed up little showers of snow. You would think I waddled like a goose. I had never before considered that walking might not be innocent.

I blushed and acknowledged, as we walked on toward the farmhouse, that maybe I should take up curling, after all. He laughed and said he’d never yet met anyone for whom curling wouldn’t do some good.

It got me thinking.

I thought of the last library booksale I attended.  It was in November and the weather had not yet been challenged by hoarfrost.  This particular sale was held in a fire station.  It was a sunny day, the air—in the sun, out of the wind—was mild, and the fire trucks were parked in front, glistening red, as though at the ready for any sudden conflagration from the paperbacks inside.  The firemen were suited up like yellow astronauts—maybe to stay warm, I don’t know.  Inside its cavernous walls were rows of tables on which spread lines of books, spines up.  Echoes abounded.

Now I always feel slightly unclean at these sales, I am sheepish about accepting my trade as a book “dealer,” setting myself up in life as a middleman muddleman.  And anyway I have so many colleagues who give the trade a bad name.  Scanners, anyone?  At this sale, as always, I endeavored to make myself inconspicuous, poking around and humming with the glow of a genuine book lover.  Because I am.  Technology has devolved our trade into pure widgetry, but I still relish the feel of a good book.  Well made, beautiful binding, perhaps charming illustrations, or simply a writing that boasts of actually contributing something to the world.

But thanks to bar codes and satellites and scanners, the dim-witted mercenaries—usually overweight, usually nearsighted—who aim only to make a dollar—and a tattered dirty one at that—can sweep through a sale, shooting their red lasers against the zebra stripes, and part the valuable from the dross in no time.

Scan me a river—I’d rather be a bipedalling poverty-picketed bookseller.  And I am.

At this sale the scanning booksellers were doing their disco thing, blinding us all with their laser show, but I kept my head down and found some interesting older volumes, mostly in the world history section.  After an hour I was fatigued of book titles and so, content with my bounty of two tote bags, I paid my fare and lumbered out to my bicycle to make the six-mile journey home.

As I was about to straddle my bike, I heard a voice behind me.

“Ever race the Amish on that thing?”

Standing with his own totebag of books was a kindly faced gentleman, a slender fellow fortyish with unruly graying hair.  Confident and intense was his posture, and overall I would say he had about him the look of a recovering hippie.

“I am the Amish,” I replied with a smile.

He tossed his head back, unbewildered.  “Ah, yes.  I bet you are.  That helmet of yours gives you away.  You know, I once raced the Amish down an empty lane…”  He gazed into the distance, trying to see to the end of that very lane, perhaps to recall who won.  Giving up, he declared, “They are not to be fooled with.”

“I believe you.”

By this time he was heading for his own bicycle, and I was mortally afraid he would be going my direction.  Riding two abreast with a stranger down a state highway was not a prospect I relished.

Surveying my bags, he asked of the books: “Do you read them or sell them?”

Weighing the karma of my response, I decided against lying.  “Both,” I said.

“Ah!  I’m glad.  So many here, you tell they only do the latter.  Seems a sorry way to earn beer money.”

“And you…?” I asked, hoping he might have an equal confession.

“Oh, no, these are just for the library—our library—that’s all.  Heading south?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my journey home takes me to the Swamp Oaks.  Farewell!”

And that is how it started.  Happenstance, and then a sudden letter.  Soon I found myself—midwinter—lumbering along a salt-stained country road in search of a man who sent me a signed blank check.  It was a sunny cold January day, clouds parting everywhere, and the last mile was all uphill.  I had no idea what would follow.

It’s early January and the high holy days of the shopping—not to say religious—calendar have passed.  It’s bleak out there and the books aren’t selling and my inbox isn’t filling so I head across town to the thrift store.

The roads are salty-white but clear for riding.

I don’t bother to look at the books (I’ve enough unwanted tomes in my orphanage) but instead I head for the sporting goods department, where I try out all the tennis rackets.  For snowshoes.  I find two rackets with wooden frames and lace them up on my feet easily enough, then clog my way over to the checkout counter.

Back home, I walk half a mile through the pine woods behind my house, leaving a trail of tennis racket prints in my wake, up to the bald patch at the top of the hill.  It’s a nice spot.  I’m still in the city limits and can hear trivial whines of police and fire sirens, but gazing east I see only rural white hills rolling, hills hitched together without end, hills that gently thicken and deepen and at last become the Catskills fifty miles thither.  I love to look on the rolling folds of land, though they do make me a little seasick.  I try to catch the foggy nexus where one hill fades into the next behind it, and imagine myself riding my bicycle across them, riding away into the sunrise.

It’s a good place to welcome winter.

Something I did not anticipate, when I adopted this trade, was the compulsion to shift the books about on shelves, to consider each book in relation to those around it, to rearrange and find just the right symmetry of spines.  I’m at the far end of the commodity spectrum.  This is housekeeping by another name, and with a melancholy tinge too because these books for sale online never are browsed by anyone but me.  Selling books from home is my bit of sand-castle building, on a largely deserted island.  Or rather, glass-blowing and sending the bottles on the waves one at a time.

Keep all the books in one place and the house is apt to get bedsores, I suppose.  Maybe I take the business principle of moving inventory too literally.  Perhaps this restlessness is inherent in a sedentary tapping-keyboard kind of livelihood.  I have a fear of laziness and for all its easy-chair ways, bookselling can actually be an excellent way to keep in shape.  All you have to do is to get the hankering, once in a while, to rearrange your books.   Booksellers have a reputation for being a pasty-pastry sort, but I know one stalwart of our trade who gave up his gym membership in favor of bench-pressing the complete works of Kipling.  There’s honesty in one’s body as much as one’s words, and moving books around hones the blade of that integrity.

So I have decided to arrange my books by color.  Consider it a Rothko experiment.  I have four rooms lined with bookshelves—there are only four rooms in my modest hacienda, not counting the kitchen and water closet—and each, I think, shall be devoted to a different piece of the color wheel pie, and I will know for certain where my green gables lie.  I shall not stutter when the friar appears and puts forth his query.  I will be ready.

Today, as I stand at my window watching a nuthatch wind its way down a basswood trunk, I think of my old school, and I hope it is still sinking after all these years. I never thought to tend to my reunions. Thickly surrounded by books, thicker than my high school’s library ever was, I wonder how many inches I lose every year. I would hate to be, ultimately, yet another victim of insulation.

To stop someone from flying, one simply produces an adequate anchor. But how do you stop something from sinking? Would a habit be of help?

Received an order yesterday—an obscure chapbook of poetry, sixty-four pages of nearly tolerable rhymes, published two decades ago. The order (welcome as all orders are) was unremarkable except that the customer’s name matched the author’s. I thought, this is the saddest thing in the world. I will package this book with my condolences.

I have never thought of being an author and to judge by the proliferating creative writing programs I fear I am somehow deficient, somehow unamerican. Everyone has a book in them, they say; even so, I imagine to extract that book requires considerable surgery, a lot of scratching of the scalpel.

But if it is a source of freedom to let a book go off into the world to seek its destiny, what is the meaning of calling that journeyman back into your hand? I can’t imagine, I admit, but if I were to leave breadcrumbs on the trail behind me I don’t think I would have the courage to gather them up a score years later. I am certain they would be covered in mold or perhaps cached away in the underground nest of a white-footed mouse, and I would never wish to deprive a mouse of anything.

For a while I stacked the massmarkets in my living room, which doubles as my online orphanage.  (Translate: particleboard bookcases everywhere, cluttered thick with books and dust.  Terrible corridors, terrible shadows).  I made a small canyon with the massmarkets as I studied their spines, science fiction something or others, as if they were the building blocks of America.  Stacked them a dozen deep, tended my inner Andy Goldsworthy, and found the plumb spine of gravity that held a taut clean line.  I didn’t research their prices–didn’t want to know the pennies they were going for.

When they started to talk to me I decided it was time to water my buffalo and convey them to the bookstore downtown.  This bookstore, the only one in town, is the penultimate cog in my waste stream.  Anything I can’t use but still has a pulse I take there, for trade-in credit.  The owner is grumbly and generally impolite, typical for booksellers though he lacks the virtue of burliness.  But his store is a quaint redoubt against the ever pervasive online tentacles, of which I am a part.  He doesn’t sell online, doesn’t even have a website.  He is the uber-bicycling bookseller.  I believe he doesn’t bicycle at all.  He lets people bicycle to him.  He is the future of the trade, his brow furrowed and set against the salty tide splashing him in the face which he is, I suspect, determined to ride out.  It’s a quaint way to live–waiting for energy descent.

As for me I pedal backward half the time.  I am but a barnacle on a slap-dashing ocean of commerce and noise.

The bookseller–his name is George and has always been George–doesn’t smile and offers me ten dollars for the lot–or twice that in store credit.

“Credit, please.”  We go through this every time.  I always take credit.

While I peruse the shelves I notice I am not the only customer in the store.  This in itself is interesting but upon a second glance I notice the fellow is in a habit–deep earthy brown flowing robe that bespeaks of monastic ways.  A thick rope hugs his waist.  His footsteps are plodding but perky.  He is serene fellow–happy, even–without smiling.  Approaching George he asks in a loud voice, “Excuse me, do you happen to have any of the Anne of Green Gables books?  Anything by L.M. Montgomery?”

George has been at this long enough not to raise any affect, nor miss a beat.  “Not at the moment.”

“Ah, well!  I always like to ask.  Thank you anyway.”  The fellow browses the children’s section for a while before calling out brightly, “Have a good day!” and disappearing through the door.

It was not the spirit of God that moved me, nothing so catholic as that–no, it was something else: the imminent spirit of this man, the sharp clean simple line of his life, dense with gravity and heft but still wild enough to be in cheerful search for novels written for young women.  It was all I could do not to sprint out the door and tug him by the collar and beg–take me with you!

Flummoxed, half-panting, feeling in me something dying and all cotelydon like growing again, I stood.

George turns to me.  “So, quick vote.  Think he wears anything under that robe?”

There are no mountains here, but there are valleys.