In the notes accompanying the suite in A Box Of Rain Robert Hunter wrote:

I wrote Terrapin, Part One, at a single sitting in an unfurnished house with a picture window overlooking San Francisco Bay during a flamboyant lightning storm. I typed the first thing that came into my mind at the top of the page, the title Terrapin Station. Not knowing what it was to be about, I began my writing with an invocation to the muse and kept typing as the story began to unfold.

On the same day, driving into the city, Garcia was struck by a singular inspiration. He turned his car around and hurried home to set down some music that popped into his head, demanding immediate attention.

When we met the next day, I showed him the words and he said "I've got the music." They dovetailed perfectly and Terrapin edged into this dimension.

Part One was for free. A good deal of Part Two, the essential idea, was contained in the first writing, but was too irregular to be easily set. I went through many approaches and versions over the years, having lost the original typescript, attempting to recapture the initial spark and place it in a lyrics context.

Part 1:

• Lady With A Fan
• Terrapin Station
• At A Siding

• Return To Terrapin
• Ivory Wheels, Rosewood Track
• And I Know You
• Jack O' Roses
• Leaving Terrapin
• Recognition

• Terrapin Transit
• Terrapin Flyer

In an open letter to Garcia written in 1996, a year after Garcia's death, Robert Hunter wrote:

Terrapin. Shame about the record, but the concert piece, the first night it was played, took me about as close as I ever expect to get to feeling certain we were doing what we were put here to do.

Hunter amended the suite for the 1993 edition of A Box of Rain: Lyrics 1965-1993 and added additional notes:

It is notoriously difficult to return to the particular space of a spontaneous vision--but I wasn't content with my earlier attempt to complete the Terrapin cycle. Cycle is the key word. The piece seemed to demand a legitimate return to its starting point but just how to accomplish this evaded me. The problem was that I was looking outisde the song for clues when the solution, implicit in Lady With A Fan, lay in plain sight the whole time.

With the following revision, I feel as near as I'm likely to get to the initiating flash, this far removed in time. It's a moot point whether my continuing engagement with the suite is symptomatic of my own attempts to Return To Terrapin, but a feeling of deep relief comes with the sense of finally getting it closer to heart's desire--concluding and adding this annotation just as a good hard storm breaks.