The far culvert failed a couple years back thanks to a flood, I think, and now points upward at the same angle as the Air Farce chicken cannon. That comparison dates me, I know. I don’t know what causes the rust. That morning, like most winter mornings, a crowd of cattails wearing toques of snow stood next to the culverts, so the water quality can’t be too bad, though I have no idea what cattails can tolerate. Their stems might carry the rust all the way up to their heads. I could almost feel the fuzz as we drove by. On days that cold a cattail feels like a lint brush, but the temperature was expected to rise 10 degrees by midafternoon. Stroke it then, eyes closed, and you would

feel once more

the velvet

dress I

wore

as a girl.

With my forehead against the passenger side window, I pictured Alice Munro doing the same, her forehead melting the frost, her eyes taking everything into the darkness and sending it forth with a rush into the light. Such brilliance. I’d been thinking about her and her work a lot since she won the prize. Imagine what she could do with this place. The off-kilter culvert, the road with the arm to keep us out, the mining complex beyond, the smokestack standing there like it had too much Viagra

all on

top of the Canadian

Shield whose

curves are covered

with the usual

lofty

blanket of snow.

— from “Culverts beneath the Narrow Road Through the Deep North and Other Travel Stretches”