But there was this one older guy in a Hawaiian shirt who only watched the trees until 2:16, then calmly got up and folded his chair. He said he didn't want to quite see the peak. The secret to not dying, he said, was always leaving yourself something to look forward to. Or at least, so he hoped.
Hawaiian Shirt Guy had learned about my woods through a hammock enthusiasts group on the Internet. He took out his phone to show me a review of my farm stand on a place called Yap or something. Sure enough, there was a picture of me at the farm stand. One squirrel sat on my head, and the other peered from my pocket. I seemed to be in the middle of blinking and talking, so my mouth was mostly open and my eyes were mostly shut. I looked drugged. The first review went like so:
"Wild Food & Poetry Farm Stand" 103 Old Mill Rd. 5/5 (average 3.5/5.0)
Good 4 local color. Propprieter is a character. (420 mabye? Lol ) Free food..@ farm stand . . . but u have to buy bad poetry.!! (srsly?lol) Said ok 2 camp tho. Sweet..! saw no hunters no bears ect. Just clean air trees & stars. will b back!1!!
And under that review, a handful more. To be honest, they were mixed. Complaints included: no facilities, inconvenient location, did not carry sweet corn, did not carry tomatoes, poems bad, too much rhyming poetry, not enough rhyming poetry.
Hawaiian Shirt Guy said he'd be on his way in the morning; he had lots of other things he wanted to almost-see, like Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon and the Northern Lights. The woods in Peak Foliage Season had been the very first stop on his list. He'd recently quit a successful career to become an aspiring "rucksack wanderer."
When I asked him why, he thought about it and laughed. "Well, I suppose you could say, I went sane."
Then I asked him what sort of job he'd quit, and I kind of wished I hadn't, because he started talking like the mogul and became really hard to understand.
"I enabled, expedited, and enhanced synergy in my department," he told me.
"Oh," I said, afraid to admit I had no idea what "synergy" was. "And your department, it . . . ?"
"Liaised with the other departments."
"I see," I said (though 20/45 at best). "So . . . the company . . . did . . . what?"
"Do you mean, what did it make? Or what was its purpose-its raison d'être, if you will?"
"Um . . . ."
"Its purpose was to grow. What it made was arbitrary and purely in service of its purpose."
"So, what did it make?"
"We made," he said, his voice dropping to almost a whisper, "plastic lawn penguins."
"Lawn penguins?" I said.
"Still do, I'm sure. Betcha they're humming along just fine without moi."
"Lawn penguins," I said again.
"Well, because pink flamingos are more of a warm weather kind of thing, see? But what about people who don't live in Florida? What about people who live where it snows in the winter? Don't they deserve lawn decorations too? And they can't very well have snow-covered pink flamingos. That would look ridiculous."
"You got me there."
"Ah. Do I detect a note of skepticism? We're talking a massive multinational operation. Factory in China, customer service center in India, main corporate offices in Texas, with branches in six other states and two in Canada. Always expanding, diversifying. Always adding new lines of specialty product. You know: holiday-themed penguins, sports-themed penguins? That sort of thing. Even warm-weather penguins with sunglasses and Bermuda shorts, to eat into the pink flamingo market. Because, you see, that's the other side of growth-you gotta eat to grow, right? Businesses devour other businesses. Manufacturing devours resources. Small, diverse entities are subsumed into larger entities and homogenized. Am I right or am I right?"
"What?" I said. He'd left me behind a few minutes ago, standing by the side of the conversation, pondering the farm stand's flat growth projections and where to find synergy and whether the poetry even needed any.
"Worldwide market domination was the goal," he went on. (My mind put down the map to Synergy and ran to catch up with him.) "Growth! That's all we talked about in every meeting. Grow the brand, grow the company, grow grow grow! You can't just sell a million plastic penguins to the million people who want penguins and be done with it. No! You've got to make all the people who don't want lawn penguins feel like they have to have one. Even people who don't have lawns."
"Okay," I said.
"And I tried, I tried, to buy into this whole thing, this 'growth' worship. I tried to believe that growth for growth's sake was a worthy purpose."
Sensing an and then, I searched for the right thing to say. I went with, "And then . . . ?"
"Ha. Then."
He stared at the air over the farm stand, into a little swarm of fruit flies. They were always in such a frenzy of reckless activity and mindless mating, like they were having some kind of midlife crisis. (I always wanted to say, Why the hurry, fruit flies? These days, twelve hours old is the new six.)
"Then, one day, I went to the doctor because I was having this pain. Right here. Right in the gut. Ulcers, right? That's what I figured. And would you believe what the doc says to me?"
I shook my head.
"He says to me, he says, 'Bad news, Jim. It's a growth.'"
Hawaiian Shirt Guy, whose name I gathered was Jim, burst out laughing. "A growth. A growth."
He laughed and laughed until tears rolled down his face, and then there were only tears and he wasn't laughing anymore.
Jim asked if he could tie a hammock to the apple tree. I told him I didn't think the apple tree would mind, though he might end up rediscovering gravity a few times during the night (since the apples were quite ripe). Also, I explained, he might have to share the tree with two flying squirrels, who came and went at all hours because they were teenagers. He said that all sounded "delightful, absolutely delightful."
So he strung a hammock between the trees, wrapped himself up in a sleeping bag, and settled in like a caterpillar snug inside its cocoon.
Tired of consuming, all through with "growth," now he was at rest, waiting for his wings to come in.