I decide to go back to the Farm, to explore it some more. I have forgotten to bring a notebook, so I am trying to remember every step of the way to report back to my girlfriend. I take a crosstown bus from the south side of Buffalo to the North side. Actually, the city I live in is not Buffalo. It is not anywhere, so I decide to call it Buffalo for ease of reference, and because it sounds gamey and tough, and seems to fit the story. At the north edge of town, I keep going where the busses and the streetlights dont keep going. Now I am walking along the Cracked Glass Express: a concrete viaduct, a dry, paved riverbed with overhanging, low-slung, defeated tree branches, where the way is continuously littered with tiny green bits of broken glass. I step very carefully, but still I get a piece stuck in the heel of my right foot, and it hurts. I see a few other groups of people along the Express, but mostly they are going the other way, laughing and stepping more boldly than I. At the far end of the Express where it is dark, and breezy with dry grasses, I ascend the Mystical Ladder, right up into the Farm. It is a surprise how physically close the place is to the ground I have just left. The room into which I emerge is made of dilapidated wood. The floors are half-rotted sheets of paneling, and thin plywood whose plies are curling apart. I can feel the haphazardly strewn boards giving way under my weight, even though I am being most cautious, advancing slowly on hands and knees, trying to distribute my impact evenly. It occurs to me that I am risking injury here, and I am not sure why. Is it brave of me, or simply ridiculous to come to this place and play explorer? Do I just want to feel as though I am brave and adventuresome, even if I know deep down the quest is nonessential or even meaningless? I decide I had better make my way to the interHighway, forthwith. But first, a little nap. Among the rubble I find a small bit of mattress supported by relatively strong joists, and curl up. My right heel throbs. I doze, feeling in my dream all the hard, sharp, or dirty surfaces around me. The place has all the charm of an antique store, combined with all the threats of a muggers alley. There is an almost subliminal sense of people nearby in time or space. But I have never seen anyone else in my wanderings of the Farm, and dont expect to this time. When I wake, I crawl gingerly across the floor, my knees or hands almost pushing all the way through a couple of times. But I make it to the interHighway, also known as the eBus, though I am not sure why it is referred to as either. It is a loose stringing together of planks, blocks, boards, and hallways or catwalks known to be fairly sturdy, that stretches along the entire length of the Farm, broken only by occasional areas where the path is unclear. I do not know who originally assembled it, or if anyone maintains it. It is just a common fact of the place, known, as far as I know, to all who come here. As I stroll, more confident now, along the Highway, I pass some sights I recognize and some sights I had forgotten. Some of the shambly, crumbling rooms look familiar. Bits and pieces of junk, buckets and trinkets and scraps of lumber from anybodys attic adorn the spidery corners in all directions. There is a strong musty, dusty smell. Walking on a brace of two-by-fours, I pass a strange and wondrous sight. I decide to call it, in my report to my girlfriend, the strangest thing about the Farm. It is a swimming pool, fresh and full of water and young, beautiful life. It is on the other side of some steamy, dripping glass. I can see girls with bathing caps, kids with bellies, some moms and dads and lifeguards. It is rich, saturated blue and all the colors of people, a chuckling blue whale improbably thriving in this dead rusty nail sea. How does it exist here? I walk on, vaguely thinking about some of the places I know further down the eBus line. I know there are great caverns, places of cool cement and quiet dust, where greenish light filters down like layers of seawater. There are hulking, silent monsters of stone and metal, who must some long time ago have performed vital functions, whose tremendous masses must have pounded and swung in the rhythms of some major production, some holy purpose, some technologically inevitable, economically driven reason for being--but nobody knows, now, what they were for. Along a part of the interHighway that is almost a hallway proper--firm plywood floor underneath, a strong lattice of two-by-fours for walls--I see a very familiar place. It is a double bed, covered with a dusty blue blanket, tucked neatly into a rectangular area that just fits it. I slept here on my other, my first, sojourn into the mystical Farm. I remember finding it, thinking what a treasure I had stumbled into, like Lewis and Clark rounding a twist in the trail to see--a peaceful harbor, a bejewelled waterfall, a pristine valley. I recall I had a pretty good nights sleep here. But I am not tired now. Something grips me, and I turn around and head back the way I have come. I go back to the swimming pool. Stepping off the chaotic construction of the eBus, I go closer to the pool area. There is also an outdoor pool, in addition to the indoor one I saw earlier. I find a place to squat and look through a screen door at it. There is more youth and beauty here. Kids whose parents have brought them on business trips or vacations. A tightly-knit species of trim-haired people with burgundy cars and clean, white, cross-training shoes. They seem to be functioning according to some unseen clock. Groups of them at this end of the pool, bunches of them at that end; they all seem to know where they belong. I am only ten or twenty feet away from the beautiful, long, wet, stringy hair of one of them. She moves toward me. I get up and go. I do not want to be discovered and thought to be lurking here. Merging back into the meager protection of the interHighway, I hear a robust male voice call out, Ive seen an Interloper! He was sitting right at the meeting place of third, fifth and sixth hours! I quicken my pace slightly. Another voice calls back, Third, fifth and sixth? And the first voice answers, Right. Six. Five. Three. I move on. Suddenly the eBus has led me to a place almost outside the Farm altogether. I am only inches, or perhaps feet, above ground level. The sun is wanly shining here, warming some bricks to my right. There is a faint smell of green to compete with the dust and old car smells. I think to myself, Id better not be here when the sixth hour strikes.