Inspired by William Stafford, Bob reworked this passage by Thomas De Zengotita

(found poem)

Say you car breaks down
In the middle of nowhere,
The middle of Saskatchewan, say.

You have no cell phone,
Nothing to read,
No gear to fiddle with,
You just have to wait.

Pretty soon you notice
How everything around you
Just happens to be there.

And it just happens to be there in this very
Precise but unfamiliar way. You are
So not used to this.

Every tuft of weed,
The scattered pebbles,
The lapsing fence,
The flow of clouds against the sky---
Everything is very specifically exactly
The way it is.

And none of it is for you;
Nothing here was designed to affect you;
It isn’t arranged so that you can experience it,
And didn’t plan to experience it.

There is no screen, no display, no entrance, no brochure,
Nothing special to look at,
No dramatic scenery or wildlife,
No tour guide, no campsites,
No benches, no paths, no
Viewing platform with natural-
Historical information posted
Under slanted Plexiglas lectern things.

Whatever is there is just there,
And so are you.
You begin to get a sense of what it would be like
If you weren’t the centre of it all.