My supervisor tried the lights in the main room of the library -- for some reason they wouldn't go on for her. Me either. So we decided to tell Lauren we couldn't open the library because there would be no light. Lauren showed up and banged on the door -- I let her in, scowling, and told her what was happening, whereupon she tried the lights and found they worked for her. DAMN. So we had to run through the whole process of setting up, and I was angry with my supervisor for having raised my hopes in the first place. In the other room it was exactly the way everything had been in my room in Green City, except instead of my bookcase there was the pamphlet file, and of course I had no bed there. Hiding behind my chair and a large pile of books I poked idly through the 'A' file. In between American Artists and American Indians I was secretly composing a book, a few pages at a time. At one point Lauren burst in, but thankfully she didn't notice what I was doing. Somehow I began reading a pamphlet about Ed Ricketts, and I began to see the scene as it was narrated by a Steinbeck-like voice: "Back in the thirties, we hired Ed to do some rock crushing for us." (The view slowly zoomed in on Ricketts, who was standing behind a large pile of rocks in work overalls from the thirties, holding a shovel. He was beckoning me over. Narrator:) "Come over here," he said to me one day. "Look at this." (I walked up and saw that he had dug up some strange sort of tree, one which had branches coming off it like a trimmed palm tree -- that is, the branches had been sawed off -- but these chevron-shaped branches had the color and consistency of celery. Narrator:) "Ed! Thank God you cut this off at the root, because that's a part we can regrow. This is a water-bowl tree, Ed. It'll bring us a fortune!" (Ed flushed and looked abashed. He helped me pick up the tree and load it into the nursery. While this scene was going on the voice-over said:) "I think the waterbowl tree brought us $900 in 1948, the year of Rickett's death. With the money we established a memorial. I hope Ed, wherever he is, understands what we have done. These words were taken from John Steinbeck's "My Life in California"."