He’d tasted the clay of baseball diamonds in 24 states, deep red virgin Georgia clay and chalk spackled Indiana softball field clay. He’d sipped swamp water from the Okefenokee- which made him quite ill from both ends but tasted so sublime he’d gone back for seconds. He’d sampled the sand of the Sahara- dryer than any dry you might ever think to try, and he’d chewed the lava from the slopes of St. Helen’s. His teeth were smaller than they’d been when he was a boy, ground by the surprisingly abrasive properties of the crust of our lonely little planet. Randolph wondered if this was partly the reason for the fact that most of the largest things that lived on the land were millions of years gone, and now all the really big creatures preferred the slippery ease of the oceans. Was it why old people got smaller, and even before they could say why children loved to jump up and down, was it to leave the grinding wear of earth if only for a fleeting moment? Randolph wondered.