On April 12th, 1970, a disabled historian named Lyman has moved into the small Zodiac Cottage and is determined to preserve his independence despite being confined to a wheelchair. Rodman, his son, would rather sell Zodiac Cottage, which has been in the family for generations. Lyman anticipates “regular visits of inspection and solicitude while they wait for me to get a belly full of independence” (32). Despite the “slow petrification” (32) that is Lyman’s disease, he has chosen to use his time to study his family history. He feels closer to his grandparents than he does to modern society, which is strange to him.

That morning, Rodman tried unsuccessfully to convince Lyman to live with him and abandon his independence. Lyman’s own father suffered from dementia, and Lyman eventually had to “get the support of the law” (37) to take him away. Rodman worries that his father is wasting his “major talents” (38) on Lyman’s grandmother, who was “the best-known woman illustrator of her time” (39). Lyman notes her ability to see typical mining phrases as “descriptive of human as well as detrital rest” (39). Lyman knows her life story well and thinks back on her time in the old frontier West; he knew her mainly as an old woman, and “it is harder to imagine her as Susan Burling, a girl, before the West and all the West implied had happened to her” (41).