I'm not preaching. I'm not going to preach. It's too late for that, and besides which, preaching never did anybody any good anyway. Let me say this, though, for the record—for the better part of my life I was a criminal. Just like you. I lived in the suburbs in a 3,000- square-foot house with redwood siding and oak floors and an oil burner the size of Texas, drove a classic 1966 Mustang for sport and a Jeep Laredo (red, black leather interior) to take me up to the Adirondacks so I could heft my $320 backpack and commune with the squirrels, muskrats, and fishers. I went to the gym. Drank in fern bars. Bought shoes, jackets, sweaters, and hair-care products. I guess I was dimly aware—way out there on the periphery of my consciousness—of what I was doing to the poor abused corpus of old Mother Earth, and I did recycle (when I got around to it, which was maybe twice a year), and I thought a lot about packaging. I wore a sweater in the house in winter to conserve energy and turn the flame down on global warming, and still I burned fuel and more fuel, and the trash I generated plugged its own hole in the landfill like a permanent filling in a rotten tooth.

Worse, I accumulated things. They seemed to stick to me, like filings to a magnet, a whole polarized fur of objects radiating from my fingertips in slavish attraction. Paper clips, pins, ancient amplifiers, rusted-out cooking grills. Clothes, books, records, CDs. Cookware, Ginzu knives, food processors, popcorn poppers, coffeemakers.

I drove fast, always in a hurry. I parented. Cooked. Cleaned. Managed my dead father's crumbling empire—you've heard of him, Sy Tierwater, developer of tract homes in Westchester and Dutchess Counties?—and paid bills and collected rents and squeezed down the window of my car to add my share of Kleenex, ice-cream sticks, and cigarette wrappers to the debris along the streaming sides of the blacktop roads.

Want more? I drank wine, spent money, spoiled my daughter, and watched her accumulate things in her turn. And just like you—if you live in the Western world, and I have to assume you do, or how else would you be reading this?—I caused approximately 250 times the damage to the environment of this tattered, bleeding planet as a Bangladeshi or Balinese, and they do their share, believe me. Or did. But I don't want to get into that.

Let's just say I saw the light—with the help of a good nudge from Andrea, Teo (may he rot in hell or interplanetary space or wherever), and all the other hard chargers down at Earth Forever! Forces were put in motion, gears began to grind. I sold the house, the cars, the decrepit shopping center my father left me, my windsurfer and Adirondack chair and my complete set of bootleg Dylan tapes, all the detritus left behind by the slow-rolling glacier of my old life, my criminal life, the life I led before I became a friend of the earth. Friendship. That's what got me into the movement and that's what pushed me way out there on the naked edge of nothing, beyond sense or reason, or even hope. Friendship for the earth. For the trees and shrubs and the native grasses and the antelope on the plain and the kangaroo rats in the desert and everything else that lives and breathes under the sun.

Except people, that is. Because to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the people.

But now—now Andrea's ensconced in my house like a badger in its den, and April Wind has blown in the door. And there she is, sunk deep in the dog-stinking couch I inherited with this place ten years ago.

"You remember April, Ty," Andrea says, and she's not making a question of it. I watch her as she pulls one of the mold-spattered kitchen chairs across the room and perches girlishly on the edge of it, her bare feet splayed over the rungs. The way she does it, the way she maneuvers the chair and settles herself—and more, the tone of her voice, the smell of her—plumbs some deep inversion layer in the unstirred lake of my memory. But that's what this is all about, isn't it? Memory? In Memoriam Sierra Tierwater, 1976–2001. Requiescat in Pace. Fat chance.