Fifty years ago Jack and Betty were hit by a train and survived. This is their story.

She parks her car, turns off the engine, and tells herself to take a deep breath, even as she prays that the van won’t come back to follow her.

Turning around in her seat, she watches as it continues unstoppingly down the road and snakes around a mountainous bend, its yellow lights disappearing into the night.

Her heart rate slows with each breath she takes. She starts her car engine, and once again begins her drive home – just another evening commute for the highest-paid prostitute in the country.

Neither side, the Green nor the Gray army, has ever won. If you spend the time to read through the 2,500 after-action reports and 40-plus war summaries, the conclusion would be that the war has been a 60-year stalemate. But winning was never the point, anyway. The war is a political statement and the war is an escape. But maybe, the war has always been about reaching back ceaselessly through the decades, past Provincetown and Wolfeboro, past Salem and Greenwich Village, past the blue Yucatan and a white Alaska and into a solitary Long Island bedroom.

I remember coming across the fact that the oldest cypress tree in the United States is 2,600 years old. Older than this country ten times over. Older than the British and Byzantines and the Romans. Not quite as old as Walls of Jericho. But older than Christendom. And older than Christ.

Suddenly, quietly, you see a long shadow rising from the lake.
Jack's hand emerges from the lake, and a pair of goggles fly towards the Louisiana sunshine.

“Yeeeeeeeee—”