'Now there comes to me a memory and I can smell the
trees, feel the hot sun through the leaves. It was on the
Appalachian Trail or it might have been somewhere else:
my best friend Jim and I, hot and sweaty, pushing our bikes
up a woodland road over a little mountain. At the top of
the slope was a spring. I remember a stone trough and the
clear cold water. There were leaves in the bottom of the
trough and tiny crayfish. The water gushed from the pipe
and it was a foreverness of itself, the endless quenching of
all thirst. We drank it like an elixir and stuck our heads in
the trough among the leaves and the crayfish and became
new and strong and untired, for ever refreshed by the magic
of that clear cold water that sparkled in the sunlight and the
shadows on the mountain.'

from Angelica's Grotto by Russell Hoban

Back to the Animation