There were twenty beds, a deer skull by the front door, old wagon wheels in dark corners, an empty dog bowl. I was the only one staying there that night. I was given a combination lock with a personalised code. The ceiling fans were on when I arrived. There were instructions to leave them spinning when I left.

I took a video for my girlfriend, texted the owner asking if it was safe to drink the water, smiled at the unplugged vending machine, and scanned the bookshelf.

An old anthology of American Verse; a volume of a poet who no one reads any more and whose name I can't remember now, though I recognised it at the time; Robert Frost, the collected poems; a King James'. I glanced at a few pages of the no-longer-read poet but was too tired for anything other than a safe pair of hands, so I opted for the Frost.

I read the one about the preacher tacking madly, stubbornly, through the New England snow, scaring his wife and the couple who's house he stops at on the way. He doesn't stay the night, despite everyone urging him too. He ploughs into the storm, giving no reason other than the storm itself. He doesn't appear to be loved, but he's human, and the other humans care for him. They worry he'll freeze to death. We start to worry, too. He makes the snow sound deep and wondrous. My favourite part is when a phone call is made and, for a while, there is only the sound of an empty room on the other end of the line, and then a baby crying. Everyone survives. We share a relief with the people in that made-up world.

I went for a walk before bed. There were mobile homes with front panels missing, old farm machinery deep in the undergrowth, dirt tracks leading to dirt tracks and fields. There were wind turbines on the loose, bumpy horizon. I wanted to explore, but the local dogs were suspicious of me. Everywhere I went there was howling. A terrier with a pot belly, grey muzzle, and milky eyes ran up to me, snarled and barked, then decided it wanted to accompany me as a friend. It followed me down the road until its owner bellowed after it from a front porch, sounding genuinely angry. I felt like I was in people's way, or that I was causing trouble, even though there were no people around.

None of this happened in this order. I went for the walk first, then went to bed, then read the Frost.

The copy of the collected poems was faded and old. I think it had survived because nobody had picked it up or opened it for years. Inside, there were newspaper cuttings from the 1960s and 70s, mostly from The San Francisco Chronicle. There was an article surveying the state of American poetry fifty years ago. It was only a page long, but it managed to sweep through Frost, Pound, Eliot, Moore, Cummings, perhaps others. The newspaper cutting had been in there so long that a dark brown imprint had been left across one of Frost's poems, I can't remember which. After reading, I put the loose sheet back exactly where it was, so that someone else could enjoy the stain and think about the decades between now and then, whenever 'then' happened to be.

I soon slept, exhausted from the day's long drive, another drive ahead of me. When I left, so early in the morning it was night, before the sun, the wind turbines in the distance had flashing red beacons, all lighting up at exactly the same time, seemingly part of the same circuit, despite having been built so far apart from one another.