“In the Country” from “Remembering Eternity”
“So it pleased Skylar to see fields, trees, bushes, and streams; white-tailed deer and fox squirrels; American crows, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, and song sparrows: with hardly a man in sight. Why was it, he wondered, that human beings and their creations, as much a part of nature as everything else that appeared in the material world, seemed so very unnatural? The colors of the fields and forests never clashed as neighboring neon signs did. The contours of the treetops and gentle undulations of the land rose and fell as they should, never being forced, harsh, or abrupt like many of the silhouettes of modern buildings and automobiles. Skylar compared the image of the privet-green, fluent stream they had just passed, with its over-leaning cottonwood and red-maple trees (their canopies faceted with sun gleams, their trunks and lower branches modest in shadows), its flow-obtruding rocks of granite and gneiss, and its banks strewn with limestone and chert gravel, to his memory picture of Times Square: the din of trucks, buses, and car horns; the stacked, ill-coordinated neon signs advertising XXX movies and peep shows; the clownishly farded prostitutes with silver hot pants and scarlet-satin décolleté blouses; the fetor of stale urine, vomit, and body odor; the dazed-eyed junkies and anxious pitchman with their oiled hair and Brute cologne.”
