Larry and Sally, husband and wife, are resting. Larry, a former academic and writer, briefly tends for his wife, who is disabled, before beginning a long walk around the premises. During the walk, he meditates on his own impermanence and the smallness of his life and experience in the face of larger, more permanent “geologic” realities. He remarks to himself, wistfully, “Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older” (12).

Chapter 2 takes the narrative back to 1937. Larry and Sally are a poor, young couple in the Depression traveling to Wisconsin, where Larry is soon to begin a job as a professor at the university in Madison. He regards his job as a “fluke” and is eager for opportunity. While bargaining for temporary lodgings with ever-dwindling savings, he remarks to himself that his position is temporary: “That deep in the Depression, universities had given up promoting and all but given up hiring. […] I was a single cork to plug a single hole for a single season” (16). Adding to this material anxiety, is that Sally is pregnant with their first child: 

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up.