Drop City

getting on each other's nerves while the snow fell and the ice thickened and the wind came in over the treetops like the end of everything. She held it a moment and then shook it out of her head.
    “You know,” Norm said, raising his voice to be heard generally above the crackling of the stove and the steady drone of the rain, “somebody really ought to take a canoe on down to Boynton. I mean, to see what the deal is with Pan and Verbie, because I am hip to the fact that Verbs, at least, wouldn't want to cause anybody any hassles up here by _delaying__ delivery of the window glass and the new blades for the saws and the two-stroke oil and the drag knife and timber chisels and all the rest of the wares and objects we are all crying out with need for here . . . unless maybe her mother's thing might have been, I don't know, maybe _heavier__ than she thought”--and here he looked to Angela, who was wedged into the corner beside Jiminy, working a crossword puzzle in a book of crosswords that had already been deliberated over, filled in and erased by a dozen different hands. Angela never even lifted her head and you would have thought he was talking about somebody else's mother altogether. But then what could she do short of hopping in a canoe herself? Or sprouting wings?
    Jiminy said, “They'll be all right. It's the weather, that's what it is.”
    “But what about yesterday,” Star said. “And the day before.” She was at the table now, trying to make salsa from canned tomatoes and a cluster of yellow onions that had lost their texture and given up their skin to a film of black mold, and even to think of chilies or cilantro was a joke. They could have drowned. Easily. In fact it was a miracle that everybody had made it upriver in one piece the first time, even with the help of Joe Bosky, who must have made five or six round-trips with gear and people and supplies while the canoes crept up against the current and Norm peeled off the hundred-dollar bills to keep the propellers whirring and the floats skidding across the water through one long frantic afternoon and a night that never came.
    Premstar was concentrating on her cards and the others were just staring out the open door, mesmerized by the rain. Norm folded his hand, then looked up at Star and gave his beard a meditative scratch. “I guess I better call a meeting,” he said finally, and Star followed his gaze out the door and into the dwindling perspective offered by the rain.
    The next morning was clear, the sun already high and irradiating the thin blue nylon of the tent when she woke beside Marco, her mouth dry and sour and her shoulder stiff where the bedding--spruce cuttings, no longer fresh--had poked at her through the unpadded hide of the sleeping bag. Everything was damp and rank. She was glutinous with sweat because the sleeping bag was good for twenty below zero and she'd zipped it all the way up the night before, shivering so hard she could barely stand to shake her clothes off. It had been raining still when she went to bed nearly an hour after Marco had turned in, and it couldn't have been any colder than maybe forty-five degrees, but the tent felt like a meat locker, and that, more than anything, made her appreciate the concerted seven-days-a-week effort they were all putting in to get those cabins up. Teamwork. Brothers and sisters. Everybody pulling together, one for all and all for one.
    Marco had told her there were old-timers up here who'd overwintered in a canvas tent with nothing more than a sheet-metal stove and some flattened cardboard boxes to keep the wind out, but she couldn't even begin to imagine it. A tent? In the snow? At fifty and sixty below? That was when you crossed the boundary from self-sufficiency to asceticism--to martyrdom--and she had no intention of suffering just for the sake of it. There was nothing wrong with comfort, with twelve-inch-thick walls and an extravagant fire and a pile of sleeping bags to wrap yourself up in and dream away the hours while the snow accumulated and the wind sang in the treetops. And why not sketch a cup of hot chocolate into the picture--and a good book too?
    They'd already sited the cabins, walked them off in the dirt and sat there to admire the prospect of the river each of them would have, a little semicircle of neat foursquare peeled-log cabins like something out of a picture book, and as soon as the meeting hall was finished, they were going to start in on them. And the big