Justin is gone; he went downriver to hang with the family. Yesterday was a luminous day-- no rain, but we were shielded from the sun most of the day. We spent hours on the water, then came home for filet mignon with friends, followed by a long walk in the evening with other friends.

He reflected this morning that it was the sheer ease with which a person can get into real woods here that sets Maine apart. I told him that was an illusion, nowadays. In the Portland area, one is hours from woods. The obscenely overdeveloped coastal zone narrows as you go east, but none of it has to do with woods. It's more like Michigan or Connecticut down there.

The character you speak of is being attacked, year by year, I told him. More and more development is always in train. It's true that people have, up here, this resource, which is wildness. But people see no advantage to preserving it if sixteen more jobs can be created by the wave of a developer's wand.

These developers are not big businesses, usually, either, barring Irving and WalMart, but small business, which is the real enemy. Small business insists on the particularity of property; it is the greatest advocate for crassness and irreflective self-indulgence. We hold nothing in common, they say, and if one holds a property right over something one owes no consideration to any community at large or any heritage to follow.

Far from being the backbone of community, in that sense they are its opposition in every case, reducing to dollars every good, and keeping score with dollars in each measure of mankind's life: A sweep of complex and beautiful majesty from headwater to the big lake? Who owns that, exactly? Well, then, he can destroy it, of course. Next question.

A culture? A civilization? Future generations? Larger issues? None are allowed to impinge on development. Wildness is merely a tourist draw. You can make much more money by converting it to tract homes. Culture, civilization, and future generations are mere words to spice up an ad campaign.

I'm too harsh? If we believed we owed anything to our children's children, we would have acted like it and saved something for them. If we really imagined we participated in a civilization or possessed a way of life worth improving or preserving, we would have made at least one decision which gave those things any regard.

And yet, they all tell us that Small Business is the central term of life itself, the heart of the culture and the backbone of the community. You like to step into a canoe in a place where you can no longer hear the highway. What makes you think that should carry any weight whatsoever?

This was a democratic republic, once, with a capitalist economy. Now it is entirely a capitalism. People have no bearing on policy, except that we may need more cops to preserve our policy from its domestic victims and a bigger army to protect our policy from its foreign victims.

He thanked me for my views on the matter, and went down the river. We shall still be canoeing, though, while the season lasts. I can only despair to imagine how my grandchildren will manage to have such another day as yesterday was. Wildness is going, and I see it, year by year, leaking away.