evidence: I threw my bags in my tiny room at the Gifford House and trudged out to visit my friend Larry Collins, a photographer and painter and a Vietnam vet who had recently moved into senior housing right across from the cemetery (where I have located Rosilla’s grave) so the only thing to talk about was the future, which is death. After Thoreau witnessed the wreck of the St. John (but before he wrote Cape Cod) he travelled to Fire Island to gather the remains of Margaret Fuller. She was the only female member of the transcendentalists and an early war correspondent whose own writings had inspired Thoreau to write Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. She had gone to Europe to cover the Italian revolution and fell in love with a count and got pregnant by him and, broke, they decided to come here. The boat was weighed down by a lot of Carrera marble and a friend told Fuller I wouldn’t get on that boat.