“I really don’t.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Isn’t that just lovely?”
“Is it?”
“Adjust your perspective, modern man. There are uncharted worlds within your reach. In fact, you are on their shores now. The information age is puttering somewhere back there in the lands youleft behind. Whatever information is here you will sow and harvest yourself. How does that sound?”
“I don’t know. Worryingly colonialist?”
Her expression darkened.
“They are metaphorical lands. And I can’t decide if you are joking or missing my point intentionally.”
“I hear you. You’re trying to make this a lesson about becoming comfortable with the unknown?”
Valentina set aside her coffee cup.
“That lesson arrives most days whether or not we invite it. But we are not in the business of passively noting our own ignorance. We are in the business of finding out.”
She stood up abruptly.
“Come along, Mr. Green. To the library.”
He nodded to the ceiling as they went out.
“Bye, Blobert.”
Blobert blinked wetly.
At the foot of the ancient oak to the rear of camp, they climbed a spiral staircase built of halved logs leading to a massive tree house twenty feet above the ground. The stairs ended at a hatch. Valentina threw it open and climbed in with the thoughtless agility of a twelve-year-old.
“Cool, the tree fort,” Green said as they entered. “I’ve been excited to see inside.”
“Tree fort? My apprentice, we aren’t here to play Tarzan. This is a place of study.”
He didn’t argue, but he knew there was no way he would ever surrender the fun of that place.
Entering, he saw that, most of all, it was a temple dedicated to books. The living trunk of the oak, gray as a mourning dove, grew through the center of a broad circular space carpeted with a dozen mismatched rugs and walled with shoulder-to-shoulder bookshelves. Several round windows and one massive skylight brought themorning sun into the room. A hanging rope ladder led to a hatch in the library roof, one of Valentina’s explicit off-limits spaces. A few desks, small tables, and reading chairs crowded around the trunk.
“This is…amazing.”
“Fire and flood. The two perennial enemies of books. I wanted this room set apart from the other structures.”
Green shook his head.
“No. No, this isn’t just practical.”
Valentina raised an eyebrow.
“This feels like, I don’t know the right word. A holy place?”
She paused and looked around her. The living tree. The pooled sunlight. A book collection multiple lifetimes in the making.
“I take your point. With or without intention, some places are simply sacred. They accrete and concentrate meaning.”
In that moment. Looking at that room. Green had never felt more certain that he had made the correct decision in coming to the mountains. For weeks, he felt that his life had been building to a crescendo of chaos and dread. Standing in the library tree, he began to feel a new hope that all his doubt and terror had been paying for something worth having, something he might actually cherish in an earnest, unforced way.
He had a moment of déjà vu.
