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“O” so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that coast, it’s a foggy night tho sometimes you can see stars in the sky to the right where the sea is, tho you cant see the sea you can only hear about it from the cabdriver—“What kinda country is it around here? I’ve never seen it.”

“Well, you cant see it tonight—Raton Canyon you say, you better be careful walkin around there in the dark.”

“Why?”

“Well, just use your lamp like you say—”

And sure enough when he lets me off at the Raton Canyon bridge and counts the money I sense something wrong somehow, there’s an awful roar of surf but it isnt coming from the right place, like you'd expect it to come from “over there” but it’s coming from “under there”—I can see the bridge but I can see nothing below it—The bridge continues the coast highway from one bluff to another it’s a nice white bridge with white rails and there’s a white line runnin down the middle familiar and highwaylike but something’s wrong——Besides the headlights of the cab just shoot out over a few bushes into empty space in the direction where the canyon’s supposed to be, it feels like being up in the air somewhere tho I can see the dirt road at our feet and the dirt overhang on the side—“What in the hell is this?”—I’ve got the directions all memorized from a little map Monsanto’s mailed me but in my imagination dreaming about this big retreat back home there’d been something larkish, bucolic, all homely woods and gladness instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the dark—When the cab leaves I therefore turn on my railroad 6