Every Third Thought by John Barth Read Free Book Online

its valuable wood- and wetlands would be being deforested, drained, and turned into farmland like so much of the rest of our peninsula, without regard to the environmental consequences.
    “The what ?” Ned wants to know, and his parents explain.
    “But when you were five years old ,” Mrs. Prosper recites at “Landing Number Five! ”—the last platform before the tower-top observation booth —“you two were kindergarten friends. ... ”
    “And now you’re six years old!” we choristers then proclaim in unison, one of us at each platform-corner and the eyerolling birthday boy at its center. “And here’s how your birthday poem ends:
    Happy birthday to you,
Happy solstice day too!
May you prosper, Neddy Prosper,
When the winter is through!”
    “Wow,” allows he, quite obviously wowed as his family hugs him while Narrator looks enviously on. Then “Better get ourselves aloft now,” Mr. P. advises, “if we want to see what we’ve hauled all this way to see. Same climbing-order, please, and do be careful”—the final, shorter ascent being no angled stairway, but a vertical metal ladder leading to a narrow walkway around the booth. His sister thus positioned directly above his head as we climb, Ned calls out “We see Christmas!” even though, for the aforementioned winter-wardrobe reasons, we don’t. Nor had Narrator ever, except for a few fleeting instances on playground swings and seesaws, seen up a girl’s skirt to her thusdesignated underpants, not to mention—what Pal Ned claimed his sister had displayed to him more than once, and what in
the season to come, up in the Prosper family attic, she’ll offer for Narrator’s Let’s-Play-Doctor examination—the bare-naked Mystery itself.
    “Boys . . . ” tut-tuts Mrs. P.
    “Will be boys,” her husband supposes, standing by at the ladder-top to hand each of us safely up onto the walkway. “Looks like we’re just in time and might even luck out with the clouds. Remember not to look directly at the sun till it’s almost all the way down, okay?”
    Had Narrator ever even seen a proper sunset before? Certainly not such a view of one, from such a viewpoint. The great Chesapeake itself—“Largest estuarine system on the planet,” Mrs. Prosper informs us, having first defined estuarine “for any who mightn’t know”—is visible to westward beyond the snow-patched marsh-grass and loblolly pines; a few last workboats are motoring in toward Rock Harbor, and Maryland’s western shore—which Narrator had seldom set foot on, but the Prospers often ferried over to, to Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore—can be made out on the far horizon. Toward it the great orange sun has already descended to an altitude of no more than one Solar Diameter (term supplied by Ned, who some minutes later will officially announce, “Lower limb touching!” and bump his left leg against Narrator’s right).
    Despite Dad Prosper’s warning, what youngster could not steal furtive glances aplenty as the grand disk first touches the hazed horizon and then steadily sinks behind and below it, its movement perceptible for the first time in Narrator’s life? “And
remember,” Mrs. P. reminds all hands, “it’s not the Sun that’s moving, but us : the Earth spinning on its axis from west to east.” A literally dizzying idea, at that height and in those circumstances: Narrator grips the platform-rail to steady himself as, with parental permission once the sun is two-thirds set, they attend its final disappearance, hoping to see the legendary green flash reputed to occur under just the right atmospheric conditions at sunset’s last moment, but which none present has ever witnessed.
    “I think I saw it!” ventures Ned.
    “Did not,” declares his sister.
    “Maybe on Birthday Seven?” either Mom or Dad offers, and the other says, “Time for us to go down now, while there’s still light to see by. Hasta mañana, O sole mio, and pardon my French.” And on the merry