Word: arnolds
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...Arnold's own personal rush comes from the warmth of his customers. They need him desperately, after all, and when they hear his plane they are out on their makeshift runways, pulling sleds, flashing blinding smiles. On this route the mailman is always invited inside. A couple who wish to be known only as Newt and Sharon baked him a cherry pie on this particular visit. Sharon makes her pastries with bear fat. They talked of the six otters they had seen outside in the Salmon River that morning. Newt tore through his mail, furiously writing checks as he went...
...next stop, a woman named Frances Wisner, a south Texas telephone operator who settled on the river in 1940, sat waiting with her German shepherd under a lean-to. She wore more layers than a high-society wedding cake. She gave Ray Arnold a meat-loaf sandwich, a cup of steaming coffee and a piece of her mind. She said it might help the federal deficit if they placed higher taxes on every soft drink but Coca-Cola, which she drinks, and every candy bar but Milky Way, which she favors. Around them, gathering dusk turned...
...Arnold flew home with a full moon rising. He had covered 550 miles. The people he had seen are not hermits in the real sense, not even xenophobic (they chatter all day on their radios; they welcome strangers who accompany Ray), so much as they are shot through with oldtime ornery independence, misfits with a thing against clocks. To understand what drew them here, one need only remember those maps where population density is shown by clusters of black dots--each dot representing 100,000 people, say--on a white background...
...year, according to scholars, that Matthew Arnold wrote his poem Dover Beach, England was the richest, most powerful, most industrially sophisticated nation in the world. Progress was the nation's goddess, in whose honor was staged the Great Exhibition of 1851, a festival of English wealth and material advancement. While England celebrated itself, Arnold was on his honeymoon in the seaport town of Dover, writing a brief poem that eventually would be remembered by many more people than would remember the Great Exhibition, indeed would become the most anthologized poem in English. But Dover Beach was not a celebration...
...world looks a good deal different from the one that appeared to Arnold. The imperial impulse that brought Europe to its glory eventually helped bring it to its knees, and the world's richest, most powerful, most industrially sophisticated nation now lies to the west of England, on the far side of an ocean. In 1851 Arnold could stand in his country, gaze across the Channel at France and behold the world's two giants. These days one may behold the world's two giants from the moon or from the Bering Strait. But where, metaphorically, is our Dover Beach...