Free Remembering by Wendell Berry

They hung their sweated clothes on willows in the sun to dry, and sank themselves in the cool stream up to their noses. It was a good hole, deep and shady, with the sound of the riffles above and below, and a kingfisher flying in and seeing them and flying away. All that afternoon when they got too hot, they went there.
    â€œWell sir,” Mat says, “it made that hard day good. I thought of all the
times I’d worked in that field, hurrying to get through, to get to a better place, and it had been there all the time. I can’t say I’ve always lived by what I learned that day — I wish I had — but I’ve never forgot.”
    â€œWhat?” Andy says.
    â€œThat it was there all the time.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œRedemption,” Mat says, and laughs. “A little flowing stream.”

    Beside Andy, the city stands on its hills, beyond the last dry pull across the rocks, the last dead mule and broken wheel. He can hear it, all its voices and engines washed together in the long murmur of its waking.
    Once, years ago, he and Flora and their friend Hal Jimson stood on Tamalpais, all the world below them covered with fog, and heard that murmur, low and far away, as of a country remembered. The sea of fog, white to the horizons, gleamed below them, and, in the draws of the mountain, swallows swung and dived in their hunting flights as though they moved in the paths of some unutterable song.
    And that was on the way. He is not going there.
    All the Marin peninsula is in sunlight. So far away, so bright, it might be the shining land, the land beyond, which many travelers have seen, but never reached.
    But the whole bay is shining now, the islands, the city on its hills, the wooden houses and the towers, the green treetops, the flashing waves and wings, the glory that moves all things resplendent everywhere.

4. A Long Choosing
    Though he has not moved, he has turned. I must go now. If I am going to go, it is time. On the verge of his journey, he is thinking about choice and chance, about the disappearance of chance into choice, though the choice be as blind as chance. That he is who he is and no one else is the result of a long choosing, chosen and chosen again. He thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him, most of whom he never knew, some he knew, two he yet knows, who, choosing one another, chose him. He thinks of the choices, too, by which he chose himself as he now is. How many choices, how much chance, how much error, how much hope have made that place and people that, in turn, made him? He does not know. He knows that some who might have left chose to stay, and that some who did leave chose to return, and he is one of them. Those choices have formed in time and place the pattern of a membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it, which he did once, and now has done again.

    Nancy Beechum had her father to keep house for and then nurse and then bury, and her brother to raise. Ben Feltner was her faithful and patient suitor for eleven years. They married in 1879, when she was thirty-four and he thirty-nine. They had four children, of whom Mat, after the perils of birth, accident, and epidemic, was the one survivor. Mat was the first Feltner in his own line to leave Port William after the first ones had
come there at the beginning of the century, and by then it was the beginning of the next.
    He did not go by his own choice. He went because he was sent; he was fifteen, and the time had come to send him, if he was ever to go. He had been the subject of discussion between his father and his mother, he knew. And so he was discomforted but not surprised when one day, instead of leaving the dinner table when he was finished, his father remained in his place and thought, and looked at Nancy, and looked at Mat.
    â€œMat, my boy, we think highly of you, you know, and so we must part with you for a while.”
    They had arranged for him to attend a boarding