or directly from 
The bitterness in his voice floated up to me with the words. I did not care.
The paramedic looked at Barry diffidently as he handed him the clipboard. “Please sign this,” he said, and then added, “Sir, if you’re a doctor, would you like . . . ?” The young man gestured toward the body.
Barry shook his head. “You men are doing fine. I’ll see to her at the hospital, if she makes it. Which I doubt,” he added.
Barry signed the paper on the clipboard, and both men turned to watch the proceedings.
The late afternoon spangled ripples on the lake, but the reflections were not sufficient to completely obscure the strange sight of neatly laid out strips of concrete running from the edge of the sandy bank, where the men stood around my body, into the lake. There, other concrete strips crossed at right angles, the white grid finally fading into the bottle green depths of the water.
This was Arcadia where I grew up.
More precisely, it was what was left of Arcadia. During the thirties and forties, when the building of dams on the rivers of the southwestern plains was at its height, several communities, such as my hometown, had been completely inundated by the rising water of man-made lakes.
The Army Corps of Engineers meticulously moved, or removed, all the buildings from Arcadia. In fact, St. Paul’s Church, where my father was, and still is, rector, had been removed and completely reconstructed on its present location in Summit, the nearest, and much larger, town.
That was in the spring of 1949. I had just had my seventh birthday and finished Miss Thompson’s first grade.
©2008, Janet Taliaferro
A Sky for Arcadia (Chapter One) – Part 4
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