The End of Country (11 page)

But this time it was different. Though it was not quite noon, the place was jumping, and the cash register was beeping like a Geiger counter. I exchanged a brief greeting with the harried young woman behind the register. The poor woman barely had time to breathe. I felt guilty about just ordering a coffee. “Always like this?” I asked, trying again to spark a conversation.

“These days,” she replied with a weary smile.

“It’s all the gas?”

“Pretty much.”

“Everybody around here happy about that?” I asked.

“I am,” the owner barked from behind the griddle, not looking up from his work. “It’s doing a lot of good here.”

It wasn’t easy to sustain a conversation with the man. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to talk; he wasn’t, especially not after I dropped a few new names and a few other hints that, as far as he was concerned, proved my bona fides as a local in exile. It’s just that he was busy. But he tried. Gamely.

Between plating tuna melt sandwiches and burgers slathered with American cheese, he allowed that there were a handful of people in the area who were not as enthusiastic about the developments in Dimock as he was. There were those who warned that the constant influx of trucks would alter forever the rhythms of the place, that there were environmental dangers that no one was calculating, that the wealth that everybody was talking about would not be evenly distributed. They worried that the gas companies would ship most of the profits out of state and then, sooner or later, head out themselves. But there were few of those voices, and the guy hunched over the grill wasn’t worried about any of that. He was doing well, and he wasn’t the only one, he told me. All the local service stations, the restaurants, even the few motels in the area were getting a lot of business. And that wasn’t even taking into account all the folks who had signed leases with the gas companies.

I asked him for some specific names, and he rattled off a few people in the neighborhood; some I knew, some I knew slightly, and some I knew not at all. Among them were those who, in his estimation, were well on their way to wealth, folks like Cleo Teel. The first well up there had been drilled on Cleo’s place. Another was drilled on the land belonging to the widow Rosemarie Greenwood down the road.

And what about the opponents?

There was, he said, one woman—he couldn’t remember her name, she was a newcomer, a retired teacher who didn’t seem too happy with the developments around there and hadn’t made a secret of it. Some of the locals had even wondered publicly whether she might be some kind of radical. And then of course there was Ken Ely, who was sitting on some of the most promising land that Cabot had leased. He didn’t get terribly specific about Ken’s reservations. I still couldn’t see the man’s face, but I could hear the amused, affectionate aggravation in his voice when he said the name. The girl behind the register had the
same reaction to the name, letting out a little chortle, as if her boss had just mentioned a crazy but beloved uncle. I couldn’t help but smile myself. “Ken sort of sees things his own way,” the man said, as if that was all the explanation I needed.

In a way, it was. I had already heard from a neighbor of my mother’s that the drillers were working on Ken Ely’s place, and I had been more than a little pleased by the notion that the sometimes cantankerous self-described hermit and occasional quarryman whose service station had been down the road from my mother’s house, the guy who in his pump jockey days had been far more generous to me and to others than he could afford to be, might be sitting on a gold mine. In fact, I had been hoping to catch up with Ken when I made the trip up to Dimock. And now I had some more names to add to my list. Rosemarie Greenwood and Cleo Teel—I hadn’t known either of them when I was growing up; it was time to get acquainted. But most of all, I wanted to meet that unhappy teacher. From what little I had been able to divine about her, she struck me as the kind of fire-eating liberal who might provide an interesting afternoon’s worth of conversation.

I didn’t really know what I’d gain by talking to them. I figured it would be helpful just to find out about their experience with the gas, and if nothing else, I hoped maybe I could collect a few amusing anecdotes that I could string into a story to sell to a magazine. I reached into the pocket of my jeans and fished out a couple of crumpled singles to pay for my coffee. I had better sell a story, and soon, I thought. My cash reserves were running perilously low, low enough that when she handed me back a few pieces of silver in change, I pocketed them instead of leaving them for a tip. I tried not to make eye contact as I did it, and then I stepped outside and climbed behind the wheel of my car just as a large tanker truck lumbered past me, heading down the rutted back roads toward the hollows where Ken and Rosemarie and Cleo and that woman lived. I followed it.

T
HAT TEACHER’S NAME
, I would soon discover, was Victoria Switzer, and she seemed like the last person you’d expect to find in the rusted old house trailer in Dimock where I met her for the first time. There she was, all decked out in a beige woolen tunic, muted and sophisticated over dark slacks. She had been expecting me, and in a way, I had
been expecting her, too, because from the minute I had first telephoned her, introducing myself as both a neighbor from right across the county line and as a writer, and heard her voice, sharp but charming in a Katharine Hepburn sort of way, effervescent and self-assured, the voice of a woman who’s used to speaking to people who, in her mind, are not nearly as well informed as she, I had developed a distinct mental image of her. The Victoria I imagined was lean and angular, with sharp features and sharper eyes, and there would be, I had no doubt, more than a hint of judgment in those eyes.

I pulled off the road and into her driveway late on a Sunday morning, down a rutted gravel track to what would someday be the yard of her seven and a half acres of paradise, though now it was little more than a giant pothole brimful of construction debris. A German shepherd in a rusted chain-link kennel eyed me cautiously as I parked and stepped over cinder blocks and discarded rebar and empty cement bags, picking my way to the front door of the trailer. I knocked—politely, I thought, but apparently it was hard enough to make the whole trailer boom like a steel drum—and an instant later, after some tugging from the other side, the jalousied door flew open, and there she was.

She extended a delicate hand, a doyenne in the backwoods. Even with construction debris lapping the very doorsill of her trailer, she oozed Kate Hepburn urbanity from the top of her auburn hair, scented with top-shelf hair care products, to the toeless tips of her fashionable shoes. She was almost exactly as I had pictured her. But there was one thing I had gotten wrong. Her eyes. They were sharp, all right, but there was no judgment in them. Wariness, perhaps, and maybe a little weariness, but there was also something warm and welcoming in them, mixed with the kind of curiosity that you find in people who take great pride in their willingness to learn new things and to meet new people. She almost apologized for the way she was dressed, as if she knew what I was thinking. “We have a luncheon to go to later,” she explained as she extended her hand.

The way she anticipated my judgment touched me. And I thought for a moment that I caught something familiar in it, something that maybe we had in common. Call it the outsider’s need to belong. Call it the faith of the convert. Call it whatever you like. Maybe it was presumptuous
of me, but I thought I sensed something in her that was in me, too, just as it had been in my mother. There was a quiet, fierce rebellion against the common idea that just because Victoria wasn’t born here, just because she hadn’t been stranded here by some accident of fate, she didn’t belong. This small patch of woods and rocks along the banks of a narrow mountain brook meant as much to her as to anyone, maybe more, because she had chosen to be here. She, not fate, had chosen it. And so had her husband, Jim, and now, out of all that construction debris, they were raising what was literally their dream home that would tie them in cedar and concrete to this land for the rest of their lives.

She invited me inside the trailer and poured me a cup of coffee—strong and dark, an unusual offering in these parts. She seemed pleased, and maybe relieved, when I waved off her offer of milk, dumped a couple of packages of less than refined sugar into the thick black liquid, downed a quarter of the mug in one hot gulp, and then let out an involuntary sigh of caffeinated contentment.

We didn’t make much in the way of small talk. Apparently my near silent praise of her coffee was enough. In fact, almost immediately, and without any real prodding from me, Victoria got down to business, launching into the story of her life and the land, speaking in deeply personal tones, the way you speak when either you’re absolutely certain that you’re speaking to someone who understands, or you really don’t give a damn whether they do or not.

All her life, Victoria told me, she had pined for a house like the one they were building, rustic and sturdy but open and modern, with a great room and a prow filled with windows to let in the light that would filter through the trees on some remote plot of land. She was in her fifties and had never had a place of her own until now. She and her first husband had always rented, and in the twenty years since they had been divorced, Victoria had been far too busy with the demands of her students and her daughter to spend much time on her own dreams. Then she met Jim. Like her, he was divorced with a now grown child, and he, too, was a teacher. Like Victoria, he hailed from a part of West Virginia that was very much like her hometown of Falls, at the southern end of Wyoming County, not far from Wilkes-Barre, a place that was neither fully country nor fully city, and like her,
he was drawn to both. He was a craftsman, a guy who could look at a piece of wood with an artist’s eye, imagine what it could become, and then coax it into becoming whatever he needed it to be.

After just a few dates, they had gotten serious enough to begin talking about building a life together. She had told him about her dream of buying a piece of land, maybe a place with a small stream running through it, like the house where her grandmother had lived, and about maybe someday building her own home, a refuge and a retreat that she had imagined and reimagined a million times since she was a young girl, drawing pictures of it in the margins of her grade-school composition books. Jim, it turned out, had the same dream.

In fact, he was the one who found the property. In October 2004 he had been out with a couple of his buddies on one of his marathon bicycle jaunts—“He doesn’t think it’s really a ride unless he goes a hundred miles,” Victoria told me—when he spotted a For Sale sign by the side of the road and decided to check out the property. It was just what they’d been looking for. A little over seven acres, it dropped down sharply from the road and was bisected by a cheerful little brook that ran down to a larger creek at the base of the property. From there, the land rose again, but between the road and the hill there was a stretch of comparatively flat land, maybe two acres, heavily wooded.

She could tell by the look on his face when she saw him that night that he was smitten. A few days later, he brought her up to see the place. There is no more beautiful time than early autumn in these hills. The maples were decked in crimson, the cherries in blood red, the oaks and hickories wore gold, and when the sun came swimming through the branches of the ancient hemlocks that had somehow escaped the logger’s blade, it cast a sparkling amber light over everything. She was sold.

A few weeks later, they had the land, but still no house.

Jim had always wanted to try his hand at timber framing, the ancient art of hand-hewing great trees into tightly fitting beams, the sort of construction that was used 150 years ago when all the barns in this corner of Pennsylvania were being built. He was pretty sure he could do it more or less alone, calling in local contractors and craftsmen only for specialized tasks—such as stone masonry—that exceeded even his optimistic assessment of his abilities.

It would be a labor of love, but it would take time. Hence the trailer, a dismal box of corrugated aluminum the color of a 1970s-era refrigerator that Victoria had found for sale in the side yard of a nearby farm. Someday, once the house was finished, they planned to strip the trailer down to its frame, wrap it in barn wood, and turn it into a bridge to a sun-dappled picnic spot right across the creek, she told me. But even as we spoke, some four years after they had bought the land, that day was still a long way off. The basic structure of the dream house was nearly done, and it was imposing, the soaring windows, the masonry chimney that led into a vaulted timber-frame great room with a massive fireplace nearly large enough for Jim to stand upright in. But the siding still needed to be done, and the interior was utterly unfinished. That didn’t bother either of them. It takes time to build a dream.

I told her I understood, and I did. But not everyone would. What did her neighbors think of all this?

Victoria conceded that the neighbors, in their Walmart sweatshirts and Tractor Supply work boots, had in those early days tended to view her and her husband with a mixture of curiosity and amusement, as when she tried to explain the aerobic benefits and Zen-like joy of cross-country skiing in these hills, a suggestion that she soon learned seemed just plain weird to people who had been through enough rough winters to know that no one in their right mind should venture out in such weather without a set of heavy-duty chains strapped securely to the wheels of the tractor. And their skepticism was especially acute whenever Jim appeared on the roads in that bizarre bumble-bee-yellow bicycling outfit of his (though this was a sentiment that Victoria actually shared). On the other hand, the neighbors were moderately impressed with his construction skills and his work ethic.

Most of them, anyway. There did seem to be one notable exception: the crusty old hermit Ken Ely, with his coonhound and his backhoe, who lived on top of the hill.