Jacob Winter is a man of principle,devoted to his wife and son. But his principles are put to the test when he is charged with assault and he finds himself bailed out of jail by a mysterious woman from his past.
For a man who studiously avoids sensationalism, getting caught up with Alix Callahan, fiery lesbian ethnobotanist, and her bisexual partner, a sultry Americanized rainforest girl, is a shock to the system.And when he enters Green Girls,their tropical flower shop on the coast of Maine - complete with hallucinogenic herbs and a mini-jungle full of deadly poison-arrow frogs - Jacob finds himself tumbling headlong into a heady world of strangeness he never could have imagined.
A great time to figure things out. The young man plummets from the top of the bridge, his mind scattered in the ocean wind, reaching for the sky, silent, weightless,balanced against the crescent moon.
Time slows down as the trussed steel of the bridge whispers past. The young man can not only smell the river that rises to meet him, he has time to consider how a particular mustiness tinges the odor.
It's metabolism, the reason time slows down. Hummingbirds, for example, have such a high metabolic rate, they perceive human movement in slow motion. To a fruit fly,we are statues; their day on earth lasts a lifetime.
In humans, fear increases metabolism... which is why the victim of a car wreck will describe the accident as though it happened in slow motion. Extreme fear causes extreme time stall. What is the limit? It's long been acknowledged that some people who fall to their deaths actually die of heart failure before they land. Perhaps they die of old age.
In the 4.03 seconds it takes to fall 250 feet, from the top of the Piscataqua River Bridge to the water, a man can do a lot of thinking. Not that Jacob William Winter is watching his,life pass before him.
He is simply seeing how things came to be.
