without limit of time, granted so long as the tract is preserved in its natural state.
These kinds of solutions, devised case by case rather than top-down by some abstract application of constitutional law, were the weapon of choice Raff carefully added to his armamentarium for the fight to come.
In starts and reversals, spring comes absentmindedly to New England. April is a month of cold rain and occasional, charitably brief snowstorms. Nor'easters still visit regularly, whipping up winds that drive the chill factor down to the freezing mark. Finally, by the end of April and into early May, the forsythia bushes burst into brilliant yellow and along the narrow residential streets of Boston and Cambridge, and falling white-and-purple petals of deciduous magnolias carpet the ground of the meager gardens. Among them brave crocuses spring up and hurriedly bloom before being smothered by grass and crushed by dog droppings. Until that happy time, however, anyone wishing to see emerging plant growth must drive into the countryside, push his way through brambles into some roadside swamp, and search for clumps of skunk cabbage.
This year, because it was his last at Harvard, Raphael Semmes Cody had cheerfully endured the long postglacial winter. In mid-April letters from law firms began to trickle in: inquiries and even tentative offers from Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, Miami, and New York. His specialty had recently become a seller's market. The word among the faculty at the Law School was that the big firms were stocking up on talent able to handle environmental litigation.
Raff made polite, deferential responses, keeping the doors open. But he knew his career would probably never go that way. He was going home to Mobile, with or without a job in hand.
That decision was still firm when he graduated two months later. The Harvard commencement was held, in accordance with custom, on the morning of the first Thursday in June. Raff invited his parents to be his guests for the event. The evening before, he took them to dinner at his favorite Indian restaurant, located on Massachusetts Avenue a block from Harvard Square. Ainesley was clearly uncomfortable with all things Cambridge. He was not feeling well after the long trip up from Mobile, and was irritable. Raff's love surged for him when his father put on spectacles, took a long time studying the menu, and finally asked, "Don't they have anything fried?"
The next day, contrary to custom--and some said in violation of divine providence--a light rain fell on eastern Massachusetts. The commencement ceremony, the grandest and most venerable in the nation, began with bells ringing from all the churches in the neighborhood to bring on happiness, joy, and cheers as President Lawrence Summers, accompanied by members of the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, emerged from the Old Yard and filed into the rain-soaked Tercentenary Theatre. Members of the faculty, draped in flowing pavorine robes from universities all over the world and wielding umbrellas, followed them in.
They passed along a narrow corridor walled in by the massed graduates. Cheers and greetings were exchanged back and forth over the heads of the packed thousands of families and guests assembled on all sides. The noise ended abruptly when, the groups on the platform having been seated, the sheriff of Middlesex County walked to front center with his staff of office, rapped thrice upon the hollow boards, creating a sound like rifle fire, and called the meeting to order.
There followed the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by the whole assembly. Then a prayer, carefully bowdlerized to be ecumenical in tone, the rendering of the anthem "Domine Salvum Fac," followed by student orations in Latin and English, de rigueur since the seventeenth century. There was more choral and instrumental music, and the calling forward of the summa arts and sciences undergraduates.
President Summers now conferred the earned Harvard degrees, school by school. The mood turned from sedate to merry. The M.D.s wore stethoscopes thankfully not yet used on any patient, and of course the Business School graduates threw fistfuls of one-dollar bills into the air. Raff rose with his classmates to receive his degree. He was now certifiably learned, as the president intoned, "in those wise restraints that keep us free." As he stood, Raff looked for his parents in the huge crowd, without success. In a moment of unexpected intense yearning, he also searched for JoLane Simpson among the graduating seniors. It was impossible to find her in the sea of capped heads.
Finally came the awarding of honorary degrees to nine