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Of the Fieldmans Ross begot Sid who begot Abram who begot Henry who begot Albatross who begot Alan. They cared about profit yet never with a deaf ear to the prophets. When a business practice was illuminated as onerous or anachronistic, the Fieldmans shed it like an old, tattered coat. When a bridge was to replace their ferry, they acquiesced. When fishwheels with their destruction of species of fish became the pariah of harvest, they ceased this gluttony and self-regulated.

It was this kind of business ambition nestled with progressive awareness that characterized the Fieldmans, or as Ross liked to say, the Fieldmen. While he knew the business of industry, the businesses of transportation and commerce, he was gifted with a sensitivity, an awareness of the nature around him, the nature from which he was indivisible. Back when he had skippered the ferry, he would study the Big River, sensing the flowing water as time, looking upriver to the mastodons and dire wolves, looking downriver to the city and all of its improvements to civilization, and this practice usually gave him a sense of tiredness, knowing progress led to less, not more. Sid held the rudder, thinking, “We are not beings of nuts and bolts, cogs and fly wheels; we are raw minerals and water with the sole aspiration to survive another sunset.” Yes, he pondered this and often felt he would trade all the progress to a trudge upriver to live among the ground sloth and giant beaver. But then he would laugh at this folly, knowing irrefutably that where he lived was the present, at the moment with hand on rudder, steering his boat through the waters of time, the waters of now.