Unlike Mark Twain, whose birth and death were marked by Haley’s ap-pearances, Eiseley died years before he could again witness the comet. Buthe remained faithful to another childhood commitment, also made withhis father.In “The Brown Wasps” in The Night Country (1971) Eiseley recalledhow, over sixty years earlier when he was about six years old, he hadhelped his father plant a cottonwood sapling near his boyhood home inNebraska. The tree, like the promise to see Haley’s comet, was in reality anappointment with the future. For as a child, he explained, he had wateredit faithfully—even on the day, years later after his father’s death, whenhe moved away from his original home. Although all those who were“supposed to wait and grow old under [the tree’s] shade” either “died ormoved away” from the small Nebraska town in which it grew, Eiseley, atleast,managedtoreturninoldage,duringatimeof“longinwardstruggle,”to witness again first hand the tree he had planted and cared for as a youngboy (pp. 227–36).During his sixty years away, Eiseley’s prodigal mind never forgot thetree; for it had, he observed, “for some intangible reason” (1971, p. 234)taken root in his mind. It was under its branches that he sheltered; it wasfrom this tree that his memories led away into the world. It had become,he admitted, “part of my orientation in the universe,” something withoutwhich he could not exist. For during his lifetime it had been “growingin my mind, a huge tree that somehow stood for my father and the loveI bore him,” and as a symbol, as well, for the “attachment of the spiritto a grouping of events in time” (p. 235). It was a natural emblem of hisown individuation, his own immense journey from the timeless worldof his childhood—in which he had nestled among migrating birds in ahedgerow—into his time-obsessed maturity.But having returned in time to the place where the “real” tree grew,Eiseley discovered to his alarm that it was gone, that his life has beenpassed “in the shade of a non-existent tree.” Disillusioned, his life seemedto him momentarily without meaning; he longed only to flee the scene ofthis outrage to his dignity. But as he tried to escape, a small boy on a tricyclefollowed him, quite curious about the stranger who wandered about hisneighborhood. In despair, disoriented without the tree which had for solong centered him in the world and in time, Eiseley nostalgically recalledhis father’s words at the time of the tree’s first planting: “We’ll plant a treehere, son, and we’re not going to move any more. And when you’re an old,old man you can sit under it and think how we planted it here, you andme together.”With this memory, the anguish of Eiseley’s own immense journey hasreached its nadir; for, in his prodigal pursuit of the distance in time as well