Too Much Happiness

1648 Henfryn Street.

The other number, which I needed only to check, having seen it both recently and on Christmas card envelopes, was 363 Carlisle.

I walked back through the tu

Just outside the shop was a mail chute. I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn’t know they had in them.

Deep-Holes

Sally packed devilled eggs-something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts-also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the children, a half-size Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for this occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones-a wedding present-out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.

“Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme,” Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.

“Don’t make fun of your father,” said Sally mechanically.

“I’m not. It’s just that most geologists seem so grubby.”

The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo article in Zeitschrift für Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been there.

They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road-having turned off a decent unpaved country road-and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

CAUTION. DEEP-HOLES.

Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?

The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect to find what had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.

Deep chambers, really, some as big as a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them and ferns and mosses growing out of their sides. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble that seemed so far below. The path went meandering amongst them, over hard earth or shelves of not-quite-level rock.

“Ooee,” came the call of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, ru

“No tearing around in here,” called Alex. “No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me.”

They called okay, and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Sava

The outlook did not appear until they had gone along these dirt and rock paths for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and a halt of her husband ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops-above several levels of treetops, as it turned out-with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.

As soon as she was put down on her blanket Sava

“Hungry,” said Sally.

Alex said, “I thought she got her lunch in the car.”

“She did. But she’s hungry again.”

She got Sava

“Glug-glug I’m thirsty too,” said Kent, and Peter immediately imitated him.

“Glug-glug me too glug-glug.”

“Shut up,” said Alex.

Kent said, “Shut up, Peter.”

Alex said to Sally, “What did you bring for them to drink?”

“Kool-Aid in the blue jug. And the plastic glasses in a napkin underneath.”

Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally’s breast. He thought it was high time Sava

“Well, I have to keep doing those things,” said Sally.

“Nursing’s not one of the things you have to do. You could have her on the bottle tomorrow.”

“I will soon. Not quite tomorrow, but soon.”

But here she is, still letting Sava

The Kool-Aid is poured, then the champagne. Sally and Alex touch glasses, with Sava

While this is going on, Kent manages to slip in behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened sometime later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything left in her glass and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolomite. They listen, presumably, while they gobble up the sandwiches and ignore the devilled eggs and crab salad and grab the tarts.

Dolomite, Alex says. That is the thick caprock they see. Underneath it is shale, clay turned into rock, very fine, fine grained. Water works through the dolomite and when it gets to the shale it just lies there, it can’t get through the thin layers, the fine grain. So the erosion-that’s the destruction of the dolomite-works and works its way back to the source, eats a cha

“Up and down,” says Kent lackadaisically.

“Weak vertical joints, and they get to lean out and then they leave crevasses behind them and after millions of years they break off altogether and go tumbling down the slope.”