Morning comes so late this time of the year. This morning the meathead and I set out in the darkness at 6 a.m.

For some reason, this morning I remembered the line I use to often wrap of personal adventure or trip columns: ``It was time.''

The line is adapted from the end a refrain--``IT'S TIME--in second section, ``A Game of Chess,'' in T.S. Eliot's ``The Wasteland.''

I don't care for Eliot's poetry in the broadest sense, but it can stick with you.

I didn't expect to see much in the heavy darkness with the cloud cover.

But a great blue heron flapped off from a flat just off the bridge over the neckdown between the two old clay pits.

And a pair of muskrats, apparently, had been feeding under the bridge on the shallow aquatic vegetation. Usually muskrats on the pond dive immediately when they see us. But with the darkness, they kept swimming; and I watched their Vs split around the island.

I sat upon the shorelines
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

When I start quoting lines from ``The Wasteland,'' you know: It is time.

The lights of a freight train, circling light through the last of the night, came as we walked out of the woods and brush.

Back in town, light spilled out of the exercise storefront where some women were doing aerobics.