Bridgeport dreamed in its rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river. The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a fierceness that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything…out of the weather-beaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of the leaf-wilted shrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers.
The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again, and for the short span of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife. Between the tracks and river the railroad station drowsed, a foursquare building that had the look of having hunched its shoulders against summer sun and winter cold for so many years that it stood despondent and cringing, waiting for the next whiplash of weather or of fate.
Sutton stood on the station platform and listened to the river, the suck and swish of tiny whirlpools that ran along the shore, the gurgle of water flowing across a hidden, upward-canted log, the soft sigh of watery fingers grasping at the tip of a downward-drooping branch. And above it all, cutting through it all, the real noise of the river…the tongue that went talking down the land, the sound made of many other sounds, the deep muted roar that told of power and purpose.
He lifted his head and squinted against the sun to follow the mighty metal span that leaped across the river from the bluff-top, slanting down toward the high-graded road-bed that walked across the gently rising valley on the other shore.
Man leaped rivers on great spans of steel and he never heard the talk of rivers as they rolled down to the sea. Man leaped seas on wings powered by smooth, sleek engines and the thunder of the sea was a sound lost in the empty vault of sky. Man crossed space in metallic cylinders that twisted time and space and hurled Man and his miraculous machines down alleys of conjectural mathematics that were not even dreamed of in this world of Bridgeport, 1977.
Man was in a hurry and he went too far, too fast. So far and fast that he missed many things…things that he should have taken time to learn as he went along…things that someday in some future age he would take the time to study. Someday Man would come back along the trail again and learn the things he'd missed and wonder why he missed them and think upon the years that were lost for never knowing them.
Sutton stepped down from the platform and found a faint footpath that went down to the river. Carefully, he made his way along it, for it was soft and crumbly and there were stones that one must be careful not to step upon, since they might turn beneath one's foot.
At the end of the footpath he found the old man.
The oldster sat perched on a small boulder planted in the mud and he held a cane pole slanted river-wise across his knees. An odoriferous pipe protruded from a two-weeks growth of graying whiskers and an earthenware jug with a corncob for a cork sat beside him, easy to his hand.
Sutton sat down cautiously on the shelving shore beside the boulder and wondered at the coolness of the shade from the trees and undergrowth — a welcome coolness after the fierce splash of sun upon the village just a few rods up the bank.