In the desert, the light lies down flat on the hardpan and pretends to be water. A man leaks his whole life — through the bucket, the trough, his own skin — and the only question the desert ever asks is whether he can get to more of it before what he's carrying runs out. That is the whole of the law out here.
“Water does not belong to anybody. A man can dig a well and put a fence around it and a lock on the gate, and the water will still leave him.”— From the prologue
Tom Skinner writes hard country — Alaska's cold, the Mississippi's current, the desert's arithmetic. He lives in Juneau, Alaska, where water is the one thing nobody has to beg for.
Water does not belong to anybody.
A man can dig a well and put a fence around it and a lock on the gate, and the water will still leave him. It leaves through the bottom of the bucket and the seam of the trough. It leaves off the back of his neck while he sleeps and out of his mouth while he talks and through his own skin while he stands in the sun and does nothing at all but own things. He is leaking the whole time. He cannot help it and he cannot stop it and most of his life he does not even feel it going. Every hour he is a little less than he was.
And the only question the desert ever puts to a man — the one question, asked over and over, in the heat and in the dark and in the long bright middle of the day — is whether he can get to more of it before the part he is carrying runs out.
The opening pages. The rest comes the day it lands.
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The Water Line · Thomas P. Skinner · a novel
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