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looked more like its old self — a dark muddy yellow frothed with chemical wastes from the Major’s factory. The river valley containing the town was ringed by red clay foothills, which were gashed with deep red gullies from indiscriminate clearing for housing developments. From eight thousand feet Ginny’s hometown looked like a case of terminal acne.
    She could see the factory now, a veritable city of red brick buildings, their hundreds of windows reflecting the yellow brown of the river. Dozens of huge white waste tanks, crisscrossed with catwalks of ladders like the stitching on softballs, lined the riverbank. Behind the tanks bubbled and swirled murky aeration ponds. Vast groves of tall red tile stacks were exhaling the harmless-looking puffy white smoke that had settled in over the valley like the mists of Nepal and had given Hullsport the distinction of harboring the vilest air for human lungs of any town its size in a nation of notoriously vile air.
    The factory was having its revenge on Hullsport. It had never really been included in the town plan. Everyone knew that it was essential to the economy, in this region that relied mostly on dirt farming and coal mining. But aesthetically the factory had offended; and so it had been stuck out in the low flat flood plain of the Crockett, like an outhouse screened from view behind a mansion. But, like any suppressed or ignored or despised human function, the scorned factory had come to dominate life in Hullsport anyway through its riot of noxious exudations.
    On the opposite side of the river from the factory, connected to it by a railroad bridge, a footbridge, and an auto bridge, was the town of Hullsport itself — the Model City, it had been nicknamed by its founder, Ginny’s grandfather, her mother’s father, Zedediah Hull, or Mr. Zed as everyone had referred to him. Faced with a lifetime in the coalmines of southwest Virginia, he had packed it in to come to this area of Tennessee. Then he had gone north and, in spite of his doubtful accent, had persuaded Westwood Chemical Company of Boston to open a plant in his as-yet-unbuilt model town and to back his project financially. At that time the rural South was regarded by northern businesses as prime ground for colonization, with all the attractions of any underdeveloped country — cheap land, grateful and obedient labor, low taxes, plentiful raw materials, little likelihood of intervention from local government. Mr. Zed then hired a world-famous town planner to draw up plans for Shangri-La South.
    From the plane window, Ginny could see the scattered remnants of this original plan. Five large red brick churches — all various shades of Protestantism, all with white steeples of different design — surrounded a central green. From the church green ran Hull Street, which was lined with furniture stores, department stores, clothing stores, movie theaters, newsstands, finance companies, banks. At the far end of the street, facing the church circle and bordering on the river, was the red brick train station for the Crockett Railroad. The train station and the church circle were the two poles, worldly and otherworldly, that had been yoked together to pattern and energize the surrounding town. Out from this central axis radiated four main streets. Side streets joined these main streets in a pattern of concentric hexagons. Private houses lined the side streets. Squinting so as to see just the original pattern, and not what had been done to it since, Ginny decided that it looked almost like a spider web.
    Alas, the master builders of the Model City in 1919 hadn’t foreseen the domination of Hullsport life by the motorcar. No parking space to speak of had been planned for the church circle or the shopping street, and it was now almost impossible to work your way to Hull Street and back out again during the day. Consequently, half a dozen large shopping plazas and a bustling interstate highway now