With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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Ptolemy Tompkins is the author of This Tree Grows out of Hell (HarperSanFrancisco) — a study of Aztec myth and ritual — and two memoirs: Paradise Fever (Quill) and The Beaten Path (William Morrow & Company). He lives in New York City.
Driving across America the August before I stopped drinking, I found myself in Tennessee, taking note of that big look that trees get in the East at the end of summer: a line of them at the far end of a field, like blooms of dark green ink dropped into water.