Once these were deep, fragrant, breeze-rustling, eternally twilit palaces where nature's enraptured royalty promenaded in endless unselfconscious pageantry. Where rippling running water chattered or roared in the words of the First Speech, and the sage heads of chaste flowers never yet remarked on for their beauty, nor trampled, nodded acquiescence. I took a job as a tree-planter once, and went out into the middle of nowhere to discover what horrible atrocities had been visited on this once highly recommendable location. Everyone should visit the site of a clear-cut, and walk all the way across it at least once in their life. Then, walk out of it. Not back to your car. Not yet. Into the woods. Into what's left of the mute, swaying, columns of the forbidden temple of Humanity's infancy. Across the thermocline between what made us, and what we have made of it. You might want to consider taking a nap there. Do you keep a dream diary? I know, I can never seem to discipline myself to it either. I really regret giving this one such a silly-assed, jingoistic sounding title. But not what it says.