the tag game

From my friend Bruce Hodges, music writer extraordinaire and genius behind the blog Monotonous Forest, comes this instruction:

1.  Pick up the nearest book.

2.  Open to page 123

3.  Find the fifth sentence

4.  Post the next three sentences.

5.  Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK: 

"The lumbermen were not good at cleaning up after themselves.  When a crew had felled all the trees within reach and cut off the tops and branches so that the trunks could be sawed into logs and carries away, the debris was usually left lying where it fell.  It lay there after the lumbermen moved on -- mile after mile of it, sometimes -- and the dead wood lost all of its moisture, the needles turned brown and grew brittle, and after a year or two or three the area became one vast unignited menace, as dangerous as an exposed powder magazine, waiting for one little accident."

[That's from Bruce Catton's autobiography, Waiting for the Morning Train, published in 1970.  Catton was one of the greatest Civil War historians.   This is a fantastic book about growing up in northern Michigan at the turn of the 20th century, but it's much more than a boyhood memoir; it's a meditation on how economic progress and environmental destruction go hand in hand, and how, once it's begun, technological change outstrips peoples' ability to control it or even choose whether to go on -- we're just sort of hangin on for the ride.]

I don't know very many bloggers, so I'm tagging Jackie Sheeler (Get Mad WITH Me!), Robert (Blue Heron Blast), Nicole Blackman (poet/performance artist), Steven Solomon (painter/solostudio.blogspot.com), and David Stavenger/Ghostboy (Australian poet/perfomance artist).