You might think, as I did, that on a flat pan of land in the smack middle of the continent nothing can really happen—no heights to draw thunder; anything roiling in from the coasts or the tundra would only be a rumor in the wheat stalks by the time it gets this far. Far from extremes here in the interior; everything tempered by monotonous distance in all directions. That’s wrong. There’s the lake—I know hardly anything about it, except that it also has shores in such extreme places as Indiana. But I suspect that even to people who’ve lived by it a long time it is an unknown quantity. This afternoon a sudden mist filled the neighborhood smelling like ice. The ground has turned yellow with leaves in a day, all the trees in one unseen fit of trembling. At any given moment here there’s nothing to see—a suburban plain, nothing that bears thinking about—but there’s mystery all the same. The lake commands a changeling sky; it is at perfect liberty to raise any hell it wants.

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