Inundation Day They began moving the houses in 1954.Those too large to be moved they would set alight, as the families andtheir neighbours gathered to watch. Believe me when I say that itwas a burdensome thing to live in a condemned town, a place soon tocease its existence. That every casual act carries an urgency, a fire,when your home''s destruction is a foreordained event. "They''redoing it for electricity, Holland," my employer, Lester Smart, said tome one lunch hour as I stood outside the dairy''s garage. "Electricityand cars. The Americans are after all that Labrador iron. Ford and GM, Imean.

And where they''re concerned, you can bet Ottawa will bend overbackwards to accommodate." "It stinks pretty bad," said RobertLacey, who was having a cigarette. Lacey was a bit of a drunk, but heheld himself together well enough to be a decent worker. We had knowneach other in school and spoke from time to time, increasingly about thechanges to our home, which was all anyone seemed able to talk about formonths. "I''m told they call it progress , Robert, and it''sonly the fool and sentimentalist who oppose it," said Smart. "I guesswe''ll just have to wait and see what it brings us." And that wasit: the waiting. Waiting and watching and being unable to see beyondthat fixed date.

Trying to picture tens of thousands of acres of floodedland--to imagine cemeteries, where your family has lain for generations,lost under thirty feet of moving water. In your dreams maybe you couldpicture the park you played in as a child suddenly being at the bottomof a river, the church you attended being skimmed over by a massivefreighter, but likely you couldn''t. I certainly could not. The humanimagination, it seems to me, cannot easily conjure such things. And sowe could only wait to see just what our world would look like. Ithought I might leave this place altogether. I had a brother in Ottawa.My uncle Roger was in Toronto, a shop supervisor for the TransitCommission.

Something would come along, I felt, some new directionwould come into or be granted to my life, though I''d no concrete notionof what that might be. I would hope people would see me as capable of agood many things. That would be a word I would like to hear applied tome: capable . Not mediocre, not average, but capable, in the bestsense. That I could do several things, and teach myself to do what I didnot already know. I flatter myself, perhaps, but it is not true to saythat all men possess capability. My father, as an example, had patienceand sense, but lacked ability. Whereas I had all three, enough to run asmall engine repair business on the side.

Anyway, there were possibilities. *** PoppySturges''s husband, Alex, was known to be a good man. Before he died, hewas liked in all corners of Loucksville, trusted in all dealings. Itwas generally held that he ran a good farm. Calamity struck, though,when he''d gotten his arm caught in a thresher during the harvest, and bythe time they got him to Cornwall, he''d lost too much blood and therewas nothing to do but call Poppy. Poppy came to work in the officeseveral months later. Smart had been a friend of Alex''s, and he toldPoppy, shortly after the funeral, that he''d be happy to help her out anyway he could. So she filed, answered the telephone, followed up onaccounts.

She was an excellent worker, I was told, beavering away in thethin-walled office with the slat blinds always closed, per LesterSmart''s preference. I would see her there in the office, a quietpresence, slipping in the door, sitting behind a hulking metal desk, ormoving toward a bank of green file cabinets, her arms full of papers.She seldom spoke, at least in my company. Though I did my best to bepolite, I will admit that I did not fully conceive of her as anindividual in those days. It would be more correct to say that I saw heras a fixture: an aspect of the place, of Mr. Smart''s office, and thebusiness conducted there. *** It was a Tuesday in September,1957. I''d just finished my early-morning run around Loucksville and thesurrounding towns, and was once again checking the truck''s oil.

Thatwas a habit of mine, almost a dictum: keep it ready. Meaning the truck,but also other things. Be ready. Think ahead. Smart approached meas I stood wiping my hands with a rag. A great round man whose nosewhistled when he breathed, he said, "Holland, I wonder if you wouldn''tmind doing something for me." "Of course, Mr. Smart," I said, "what is it?" "I''msending Poppy Sturges into the bank with a deposit, and I don''t thinkshe ought to be alone with so much cash.

I wonder if you''d drive her.You can take my car, if you wish." Minutes later, Poppy and I werein Smart''s gleaming black Chevrolet Bel Air, exchanging pleasantries onthe two-lane toward town. I sat at the wheel, in uniform. Smartdidn''t ask me to wear a uniform, but I did anyway. It gave me astraighter back. The cash box sat in the middle of the sedan''s frontbench seat, a way station along the great distance of runnelled bluevinyl between us. And on the other side was the woman, I was sure, withwhom I would soon be in love.

I mean you to know that: I knew right away. Shewas luminous in a way I don''t think you would understand if you werenot there next to her on the wide bench, with the sun streaming throughher hair. Her widowhood had worked to make her more tangible, made itappear that she had lived more in this world, been present for more ofthe things that mattered. I felt a charge that I hoped she felt, too. Inher bones, in the skin of her face. The wind buffeted the car and thesun glinted off its hood and into my eyes, and I felt it all, saw usboth crystallized inside the moment, preserved within a great, hardclarity. I had nowhere to put these feelings. She was, Ithought it right to assume, committed to being a widowed mother, todoing what she could to provide a life for her little girl.

That she wasdone with romantic love and all the rituals. But I felt what I felt.You may rightly call it love. And like a rising tide or a wall of water,there seemed little point in trying to stop it. *** Likemost of us, Poppy was scared and anxious about the completion of theseaway. But in the main, she was hopeful. She was hopeful that suchprogress, writ so large--heavy machines literally alteringgeography--would necessarily impose some small bit of the modern world onthis place. Most others in the doomed towns and villages feared thatvery thing, but Poppy knew the world she wanted to leave behind.

Thatworld chewed the arms off good men and left women and their childrenalone. She hoped the modern world would be a little different. Herhome, which stood on high ground, would be spared. But most of thetown, and the other towns along the river, too, would soon be moved.Buildings would be lifted and relocated or razed, their replacementsbuilt on a piece of land selected by the government''s engineers, andthen suddenly, Loucksville would be to the north and east of the oldfarm and the Sturges house. We had trouble fathoming it, though the workwas well underway. An entire town, moved. How could it be the same place?.