The Plume Ground
At Hesk the ground round Oddren is kept bare. Nobody sweeps it. It is bare because people stand on it, and they have stood on it for longer than there has been a house in the basin.
Oddren is not one thing. It is many, in one stone. The tubes come up out of the stone close together, ridged all the way up, and the stone has grown round them a little at a time for as long as anyone has looked. You tell how old it is by the stone. Nobody says a number. They say it is at least as old as something, and they name something old, and then everyone is quiet for a while, because that is the right answer.
When the fog comes up into the basin the others open, all along the shore. Oddren opens first. Not by much. You have to be watching. The plumes come up out of the tubes turning, two to a tube, and spread the way a hand does when it stops holding something, and they stay like that while the fog is high. Then they draw down, straight down, into the tubes, and the tubes are empty and you can see into them.
People watched that before anyone counted anything. The count is kept at Hesk now and it does not need Oddren to keep it. But the ground is still kept, and people still go and stand on it and wait for the first one, and nobody calls it work.
I went often. On the near side the ground is worn lower than the rest, from standing, and I liked to stand in it.
Here there is a plant in front of a house on my way to the station. It is low, with small flowers, yellow on some stems and a deep pink on others. In the day they are shut. I was told they are called four o'clocks because that is when they open. One evening I stood at the fence to see. I was there forty minutes. They opened at twenty to seven.
Nobody here seemed to mind. The name was given and it stayed. I think that is right. At home we let the thing open first and counted from it. Here they counted first and named the thing after. Either way somebody stood and watched it, once, for long enough to say.