This isn't enough material for a short story, so I'll put it here.
The property caretaker was here in late afternoon.
He asked me what I thought the distance is, between the walnut trees in the grove on the southwestern part of the property. It's a pretty big grove, planted back in 1887-1889, and all the trees are evenly spaced, although the trees themselves look like they've never been very happy here, on the eastern slope of the Sandhills. They do put out a lot of walnuts, but they're just not happy trees.
I looked out the dining-room window and said, "I dunno, maybe ten feet apart or something."
After which the caretaker roared. He's still guffawing about my talent at measuring distances.
"Each of those are twenty-five feet, exactly twenty-five feet, apart, boss," he corrected me.
I pointed out it wasn't a matter of life-or-death to me that I measure the distance between the trees, and so it wasn't important enough to be accurate about it. He was going to say something, but I pre-empted him, as I was irritated about it.
- - - - - - - - - -
"Do you suppose they [the owners of the property] would be interested in putting up a boat-dock down on the river, when happy days are here again, and they start doing something with this place?"
"I don't think so, boss; I think they plan on leaving the river as it is.
"But why should they have a boat-dock there?"
I was thinking of the cbayer primitive and her husband, on that tiny boat, and told him the story.
"it'd be interesting if they could stop by."
"Now, boss, how do you expect they'll get here in a tiny boat, from southern California?"
Easy, I said; "They could float down the western coast to the Panama Canal, into the Caribbean, up the Mississippi River to the Missouri River, and near Omaha turn onto the Elkhorn River, and get here. A piece of cake.
"This place would be perfect for them to stay a while."
The caretaker looked at me as if I were Bozo from Outer Space. He knows of the primitives on Skins's island, but in general, not in particular.
So I told him the story of the worthless freeloading bum the wily primitive, the late "Wiley50," who'd spent years building an ark in the mountains and forests of Tennessee, far away from any significant body or water or river, hoping one day to float around the world in it, while collecting disability checks.
Alas for the worthless freeloading bum the wily primitive, his hippie life-style and promiscuous scattering-his-seed during the 1960s and 1970s finally did him in, about a year ago. I guess remnants of the ark are still there, but the property owner's been cannibalizing it for his wood-burning stoves.
The caretaker said it was probably possible, but it'd never work, the cbayer primitive and her eccentric English husband tying their lilliputian living-quarters here.
