| A Walk to Dana Common (December 31, 2003) on the Last Day of the Year Cracked and buckling asphalt runs from access gate forty toward the dammed river, swelled far beyond its meager banks, far above land once considered a sacred heirloom. I set out to find what remained of the lone town center not inundated. The road was empty and the woods silent as I moved purposefully forward, past once verdant fields, now ruined, and crumbling cellar holes, some with rusted metal drums inside. Patches of snow held onto shade- covered ground, and a pair of gray raptor feathers lay discarded. At one point I left the roadway and waded into an abandoned orchard of a dozen trees that once might have produced a colorful and sweet bounty, but from the dark, rotted blobs dangling lifelessly from those sagging branches I could not tell what kind of fruit they were. My destination, I felt sure, was around each bend, so I pressed onward, but found no remnants of a village core, only a rising breeze and a setting sun. And then, faintly at first, but slowly getting louder, voices. I walked on and the road split, with a triangle of grass between the fork�the town green�and a slab of stone inscribed with the name of the place that this used to be, while beneath a spread- branched tree sat six or seven children who ate sandwiches and asked questions while their adult guide told the story of the lost quartet of towns and the leviathan that swallowed them without remorse. |