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Thank you very much to Powell's for hosting me as the guest-blogger this week. I enjoyed telling Powell's blog readers about carcasses, trash finds, and hidden trails — things I won't even tell my neighbors. Now that were at the end of series, I'd like to consider the term "guest blogger." I imagine an appraiser on an episode of Antiques Roadshow: "This is a guest-blogger, an antique innkeeper's tool. It's a long cudgel for whacking unruly patrons. How much did you pay for it?"

A few hours before I left my house for a book show across the continent, my boxes of books arrived. I'd heard a few days prior that the boxes had been briefly in my town before the UPS guy gave up and took them back to his lair. In the afternoon I had a premonition, so I drove to the post office where I found the UPS driver talking with our postmaster, Charlie, who was signing for the boxes for me. Charlie and I are friendly; he was an Olympic hockey goalie, a Harvard graduate, a Vietnam vet. He saves wheat pennies for me, because he knows I collect them. I'd already told him about Swell. So I used his knife, opened a box, and inscribed the very first edition of my novel to him.

I was thinking of Charlie later when I endured the security check at the airport. Evidently a new tactic is to chat people up. Where are you going? Why? I told her a book show in Oakland, California. She asked if I were a bookseller, And then I got to say it: I'm an author. And I whipped it out. She read the cover aloud, "Swell a Novel by Corwin Ericson." She checked the name against my ID. I hoped she'd look at the author photo on the flap, but instead she asked if it were fiction. All novels are fiction, I said. Well, I'll have to buy it, she said. Then I went to go hop around in line as I tried to take my shoes off while emptying my pockets.

My point is, the only three people who have seen my fresh-from-the-box book have been in uniform. Two of them federal.

When I received my ARC a few months ago — that's Advance Reading Copy (or actually "Advanced" as the publisher had written, which prompted a young friend of mine to ask if there were a kids' version) — I showed it to a cat. Then I brought it with me as I walked out to the beaver ponds, where I met a brand new neighbor. He asked why I had been crawling. Garnets, I told him. He was excited and wanted to collect minerals with me. This had never happened to me before. Usually I pull a few out of my pocket and explain what they are. People are typically unimpressed. This new neighbor was around 20 years old and pretty stoned. I showed him the book. We crawled up the hillside together. His dog thought it was strange and wanted to get on with the walk. A mile later, the dog came yelping back with some porcupine quills in his muzzle. I was glad I had a multitool with me — the blade and pliers were necessary for doctoring the dog.

We brought the very unhappy dog back to the new neighbor's house. His girlfriend showed me rods of green tourmaline, and said they were from a town nearby, but she was sworn to secrecy about the location. I showed her the book. I never saw them again, but their landlord told me their dog had been to the vet three times with quills before they moved away.

You know what you should do at the end of each freshman writing class? Make sure you've got all your stuff. As the professor, I see what you all have left behind. Usually I stash it in the room and try to remember to ask if someone has lost a book, a glove, a handgun. I have never bought a travel mug nor an umbrella, and can count on a new scarf every winter. There are actually trends. Several years ago, water bottles were common. Aluminum travel mugs seem to have replaced them on the lost-and-found pile on the disused overhead projector. Last year, flash drives became the most left-behind object. I understand these little drives are banned in high security areas ? the digital equivalent of a virulent handkerchief.

But what you ought to really police is the printer. This is where I find the high-value nonsense. That recycling box next to it stuffed with unread handouts is a trove of strange writing. I love this stuff when it's not my students' work. Here's what I found after class:

This piece of writing makes me think of how fortunate I am, for not having teachers who both physically, and mentally abuse me.

I think men do have a on and of switch. We have less emotions and feelings and care about much less. Woman have more emotions then guys mode swings low tolerance during there time of the month complaining want things to be perfected.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Girlfriends Parents...

My name is Jake. I am a humble cleancut young man with high intensions of dating your daughter. I am writing you a letter to grant me permmision to do so. I think it will be of in your best interest to see this through.

Sincerely, Jake.

Alas, she is the heroine after all! Well, we must be sourly disappointed when we realize that she is a heroine, but she is also not. And, as humans, we do not enjoy a non-heroine-heroine.

I like how the writer describes this girl, instead of saying she has big teeth, he goes into great detail in a comic manor.

If I agree then that makes me sound more like a retard. But at the same time right because if someone asked you where you were at on Friday. And you say I took a walk and got a smoothey. You took a walk but not to the store to beat someone up and you didn't get a smoothy after either.

There are nine benches spread around the park for seating, children have a mid-sized jungle gym to utilize, ample grass room is also present for sitting on and whatever game playing frivolities guests may choose to participate in, (in a moral, decent fashion). The park also includes areas that may be used for exhibitions of music, juggling and other such showmanship prerogatives. One last side note on this park: while in the seventh grade across from the park, at the age of eleven I died in this park by the back wall. My health teacher was able to resurrect

Not even counting the ancient cellar holes, there are as many empty houses in my neighborhood, if it could be called that, as occupied houses. The built-up trailer with the lights on a timer and the mowed grass is owned by the bank but unsellable, my neighbors say. The family across the street, where the woman was on parole for embezzling the town's property tax money, owns a couple of the half-built ones that were meant to capitalize on their farm's frontage, but which were never completed to code.

The log cabin around the corner was empty for a couple years. There had been a lethal OD there and the elderly woman who remained after the troubles never left the house. It was hard to tell when it became empty. The driveway went unplowed one winter, but the kid who came by once said his grandmother had been there the whole time.

The arrival of the plumber's van in the spring suggested that the pipes had burst. Early that summer I smelled something wrong burning ? too nasty and strange to be brush. Someone had shoveled out the entire content of the house into the backyard, and set it ablaze. It smoldered for a couple days. Among the charred furniture and blobs of plastic, jigsaw puzzle pieces formed a moldering mosaic.

I found a recent Social Security job report attached to a terribly sad child's note to, I think, an incarcerated father: "Dear Dad I miss you and love you. I now we both wish you out. I now I wish you were out. I would like it a Lot because we could take some more walks, and I wish I cuuld teach you how to play my game. and we can pLay baskebaLL. and try to call me!!!! Love your son."

I found scraps of a neatly handwritten note dated May 1978 sent home by an eighth grade social studies teacher. I can't read much of it, but the gist is discernible: "...meeting in conference...rather drastic behavior." "I have said nothing to him about the doubt of your signature. That I intend to leave up to you." "Sincerely and concerned, Mr. R."

And I found the handwritten lyrics to the song, "Call Wind Maria": "Away out here they got a name for wind and rain and fire/ The rain is Tess the fire is Joe. And they call the wind Ma-ri-ah." It ends with the chorus, "Blow my love to me." Is it even necessary to say lost and lonely are in each verse?

I took home a knee-high Seagrams bottle with a dead mouse in it, a waterlogged stack of 1950s Popular Mechanics magazines, and a couple of cartoonish animals cast in concrete. I didn't mention any of this to the new owner as we talked in his driveway. He was moving rocks around, since, as they say, rocks are the main crop in our town. It's our destiny here to decide the rocks are in the wrong place and must be hauled to another part of the yard. I do this too, which is why I enjoy watching other people lugging around boulders and not offering to help them. I declined my new neighbor's offer to come in and see the new furnace. As I left he said, "Hey! Why didn't you tell me my bandage was hanging out of my

There's a little hillside that brings me to my knees. I don't want to tell too many people where it is, since there's treasure and gore and crime, but I'll tell you. Go left out my driveway and down the dirt road about a quarter mile. Take the right under the first power lines and continue down that trail north past the gate until just before you can see the beaver deceiver in the first pond. Right there by the culvert is where I start crawling. On my hands and knees I find bits of mineral treasure — mostly almandine garnets and staurolite. I've worn out a pair of pants doing this, and my pockets are lined with gravel. Garnets are like ruddy pea-sized soccer balls. I almost never find anything of gem quality here. People ask me what I'm going to do with my garnets and I've never had a better answer than hoard them, just as I've always done.

As I crouched there one afternoon picking through the pebbles, I saw a coyote cut out of the woods and saunter down the path toward me. I'd been quiet and still; it didn't notice me until we were actually muzzle to nose. I could have licked it. The coyote was startled and took a hard right. I just sat there, with a handful of gravel, forgetting to be scared.

Last winter my neighbor called and left me a message: "There's a deer carcass frozen into the right side of the first pond. It's out past the beaver deceiver; just follow my ski tracks." Her tracks and her four dogs' tracks and the coyote tracks all led to a small bloody crater, as if the iced-over pond had an open wound. Coyotes had chewed and clawed several inches of ice away to get at the carcass. Later into that very snowy winter, a lone coyote would stop by to slurp at the pale pink crust.

I was able to exchange the favor. In February I called to say that, on the other side of the beaver deceiver, I found a freshly killed turkey. It was frigid out, of course, yet I was sweating and nearly retching. But that was because I had raced home to get my camera and back again before the carcass was carried off. The whole story of the hunt was right there on the snow and ice. Back on the west shore I could see where the coyote had flushed it and began bounding across the wind-packed snow. Midway across the pond, by a gray jagged tree stump, lay a clutch of tail feathers and a scrum of paw prints. A little farther on was a sublime sight, wing prints in the snow where the coyote had pressed the bird down on its back. This had to be its last moment. From there I followed the tracks and drag marks to the carcass itself. The body was gutted and partially buried under a stump. Again I was astonished by something terrible and beautiful; the old tom's heart, the size of my fist, was laying there on the ice, gently rocking in the breeze.

This summer I found a trail freshly cut by the cops that led to a decimated patch of what had not been tomatoes growing just where the coyote had begun his chase. There is a helicopter hated in my town that hovers around in August hunting for such places. Another neighbor once left me a message saying that it had been hovering over my house a while.

Out near the beaver deceiver, the copter had overlooked a crime scene it might have enjoyed chasing down. There on the side of the first pond, sometimes submerged, depending on how the beavers' dam is going, lies something I first mistook as flesh and blood. I pushed through the hemlocks and scootched under the laurel to get down to the bank. I found a pile of American flags, a dozen or so, wadded together; I'd seen the red stripes from the trail. Plenty of trash gets dumped out there. But this seemed of a different order — a higher level of shame and transgression. I poked them with a stick, as I had with the other carcasses, but otherwise I let them be. They're bound to be there

My friend said she'd paint the story I was telling her and call it "The Conference." She'd paint it in the manner of Peter Doig, because that's how it sounded. I felt flattered, but later I had to look him up. He's important and talented. He has a film club. He lives on a warm island but paints snow. His wiki says: "Peter Doig's work captures moments of tranquility, which contrast with uneasy oneiric elements." I was glad I had my dictionary nearby. I thought oneiric might mean masturbatory. I can look up a word faster than my computer can. But that's just because I live in the old dial-up woods.

As the postage stamps of Doig's paintings trickled in, I saw they looked like Frost poems, but in second person. I do know whose woods this painting will be set in. They are my neighbor's. His house is in Rhode Island; he'll have roughly a hundred miles to go before he sleeps, since he only has a shed and several flower beds here. My previous neighbors once came to my door to tell me to stay off that land. I lied to them and made them stand in the rain as they laid the law. They had a smashed minivan and a trailer full of hay bales on the property.

After they put the land on the market, I laid stepping stones across a little stream there, so I could trespass more easily. This is the setting of the yet-to-be-painted "The Conference." I never did tell my new neighbor I'd made the little bridge and the trails before he bought the property. My neighbor has since made two more bridges right there. The first one was terrible. Store-bought fence posts were dug into the mud and the whole thing swayed like lianas bridging a jungle chasm. I helped him make the second one, which is prettier, but even less functional — it's an ankle-wrenching balance beam made of bundled poles, and in the winter only one ski fits on it.

When I was setting this scene for my painter friend, when it was still just a story and not yet a painting, I described how myself, my neighbor, and Jack met at this bridge on a buggy day in July and how we three knew these woods better than anyone on earth. She knows what I look like, so I described the other two. Jack is a trim three-year-old with black tiger stripes. He is fixed, even though he is mostly feral. My neighbor is of retirement age, circumcised, and evenly tanned. When I first met him, he was weed-whacking in the nude. He put on running shorts and said he was a nudist. I said I'd noticed.

The afternoon of "The Conference," which until now was just a memory and not a painting nor an essay, I helped my bare-assed abutter carry sapling poles he'd cut to the stream to build his second bridge. The long pole I carried flexed as I followed my neighbor. I quietly chanted, "goose, goose, goose," as it bounced in my hand. This was because I was looking at my neighbor's naked behind. I was wearing boots and pants and long sleeves and a hat and lots of DEET. I had a long knife and a Leatherman tool on my belt. The ticks, deerflies, blackflies, and mosquitoes are ferocious there in the wet, laurel-tangled woods. While we worked together at the stream, I could tell he was wearing plenty of bug dope too. I wondered if nudists would wear invisible clothes.

Nearly-feral Jack has survived fishers, coyotes, bobcats, heavy winters, and probably Lyme disease. A few times he has abandoned his brutalizations of chipmunks to join me as I passed him in the woods, and we hiked together happily — though he tends to flop over on his side and roll when he's feeling emotional and that slows us down. One time I carried him half-a-mile back from a beaver pond and he resented it. I thought I'd been rescuing him, but, really, I'd been rude. Jack gets around; he lives off of these woods. I see his prints often in the mud on that bridged stream's banks; I've seen the fox's prints as it followed Jack, who was stalking voles along a snowy stone wall.

There at the bridge, my neighbor and I were conferring about property lines, while I was resolutely not mentioning his nakedness. He granted that, though this was his property, it was also my territory, and I was free to ignore his No Trespassing signs, as long as I didn't take anything. That was when Jack walked up the stream. I waved and greeted him. My neighbor briefly panicked. Jack, as he tends to do, hiked straight up me and perched on my shoulder. I introduced the two of them. Jack, I'm sure, has little sense of ownership, but knows the territory better than the nudist arriviste and myself, the semi-native, ever will. This will be the uneasy oneiric subject of "The Conference," though I imagine my friend might change some