Yah. I live in the Adirondacks now, near Buz's long-time stomping grounds.
That move was in the planning stages before Buz died, and I always imagined us having a beer of peace up here. I could read his love of the land between the lines, and I suspect he was a gifted steward of it. I imagined us meeting amid these old mountains and valleys and discovering that the love of this place, this huge thing we had in common, helped to bridge our differences; I like to think it would have.
In fact, I find the natural world so exquisite that pantheism is the only thing that makes any emotional sense to me--and wouldn't that have made Buz all Old Testament-y sonorous and patriarchal?
So now a dead man I never met, with whom I disagreed passionately about so much, haunts my landscape.
Go figure.
"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."