The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  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.

  When they first arrived, a couple of the neighbors had warned them about Ken Ely’s quarrying up at the top of the hill, where Ken and his dog, Crybaby, spent most afternoons rattling around in Ken’s jury-rigged backhoe, a contraption he had essentially built himself out of spare parts, trying to pry bluestone out of the ground.

  Like most newcomers to the country, Jim and Victoria had been enthralled by the ambient song of solitude, the gentle babbling of the tiny brook at the edge of their property, the insistent hum of a hundred thousand insects, the call and response of hawks and sparrows, the wind rustling through the ancient hemlocks, the call of an owl far off in the woods. It reminded Victoria of the nights she had spent at her grandmother’s place lying on the grass with her siblings, watching the stars twinkling above her, and listening to the sounds of the living dark forest. But there are other sounds in the country, too, the harsh mechanical sounds of people trying to get by in a place where you have to fight the land itself for everything you have. It’s the angry howl of a chain saw chewing through downed trees so somebody can stock up on enough firewood to keep the house warm for the winter, the bitter protest of a lumber truck or a rock truck or a milk truck engine braking so that it can safely make it down some precipitous side road one hill over, or the guttural growl of a tractor with a thirty-year-old muffler hauling a spreader full of oozing manure down the road, the moment when newcomers learn for the first time what cow shit really smells like.

  And then one morning, over coffee, they heard it, a sound that set their teeth on edge, rolling straight down the hill toward them from Ken Ely’s place. It was a nightmare in the cool light of morning. It was every obnoxious industrial sound the region could offer and then some, the shriek of the chain saw, the coughing and sputtering of an engine in a backhoe well past its prime. Worse still, there was the bizarre animalistic shriek of steel on cold stone. It echoed through the trailer and through Jim’s and Victoria’s skulls.

  Worst of all, there was the blasting.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. And it wasn’t as if they could do anything about it, anyway. The law said Ken had the right to blow up his rocks, and Ken was going to blow up his rocks, though the law also required that Ken hire someone to do the actual blasting, a condition to which he reluctantly submitted. For Jim and Victoria and their German shepherd, that meant there was nothing to be done but listen for the periodic sounding of the air horn warning that the blasting was about to begin, grab the nearest solid surface, and hang on.

  Her neighbors had advised her against challenging Ken directly—he wasn’t the type to take the admonishments of strangers kindly. And she tried to take their advice. Really, she had tried. The problem was, she was constitutionally incapable of stopping herself, she admitted. Maybe it was her father’s legacy. As a kid back in Falls, a little town along the Susquehanna River right between the rugged hollows of the Endless Mountains and the burned-out coal fields of the Wyoming Valley, she had watched her old man with unabashed admiration as he took on the big boys—the local, county, and state government and big business—to block the construction of a power plant that he was convinced would further poison the already wounded river. “He’s a tough little guy,” she used to say, and she had always been proud of him for winning that fight.

  And when she became a history teacher—she had chosen to teach a few miles south of Dimock in Tunkhannock, partly so she could be close to the mountains she had come to love—she always tried to infuse her lessons with a little bit of the individual-versus-the-corporate-state-complex message she had learned from her father. She had to admit that it had sometimes proven a little difficult to squeeze a morality tale about the zoologist Dian Fossey’s brutal murder into her regular lesson plan. And she did raise a few eyebrows around the administration office when she got one of her classes to adopt (virtually, of course) a mountain gorilla in Fossey’s honor.

  Now, the teacher in her couldn’t resist the temptation to take Ken Ely to school. It didn’t happen
right away. Whenever she got a chance, she’d grab her dog and head off on a hike along the top of the ridge, and she’d peer over the chest-high stone wall that marked the boundary of Ken Ely’s land, hoping to catch sight of him. But Ken Ely was an elusive and wily man. In the first few months she had lived there, she had seen him only once, and then from a distance, when he came roaring through the woods on a rattletrap ATV, decked out in camouflage. As she later put it, she could have sworn she heard banjo music. For the longest time after that, she’d half try to catch him, stalking up to the rock wall whenever she suspected he might be at work there, but each time, when she got there, he had vanished.

  It was unnerving, she told me. In fact, she said, she often had the feeling as she and her dog walked along her side of the stone wall that someone, or something—maybe a deer, maybe a bear, maybe even one of those long-gone catamounts that still turn up from time to time in the imagination of the locals—was watching her. As it turned out, she was right. One day she caught sight of something moving through the woods, and then it emerged, hesitantly at first, a clownish bluetick coonhound with friendly, questioning eyes, grinning goofily and wagging its tail tentatively as it approached her, cocking its head, pleading to be petted. She had made contact with Ken Ely’s dog. It was only a matter of time before she’d face the man himself.

  And then one afternoon a short time later, while Victoria and her dog were hiking along near the top of the ridge, there they were, Ken and his dog, not far from the stone hedge that marked the end of her land.

  This might be her only chance to try to make him understand. “You know you’re killing the land,” she blurted out, as the coonhound slowly skulked away. Ken remained silent. He just stood there, glaring at her with what she would later come to learn was the patented Ken Ely scowl that most of his neighbors and all of his grandchildren had long since learned to ignore. She screwed up her courage and kept on talking. His rock quarrying was more than just an aggravation to his neighbors, she explained, though it was destroying the pastoral silence she had been fantasizing about since she was a child; it was an assault on the pristine beauty of the place. The way she saw it, his quarry was a “cancer on the land”—though even she grimaced when she used that phrase, thinking that maybe it was just a bit over the top. Still, the schoolteacher in her couldn’t pass up an opportunity to educate the quarryman, and if he took it badly, well, that was unfortunate, but he’d have to get over it.

  Ken Ely, of course, saw things very differently, as I hoped to get him to tell me himself.

  VICTORIA HAD CERTAINLY BEEN right about one thing: Ken Ely was elusive when he wanted to be. I called him several times, and every now and then he’d even pick up the phone, and we’d chat. I’d remind him who I was, that I was a writer, yes, and I was planning on doing a piece about the Marcellus, but that I was also a neighbor, one of the kids who used to show up broke at his service station, whose family was facing the same pressure to sign on with the gas company that he had faced. I could tell that Ken couldn’t picture me. He didn’t know which of the broke kids I had been. And that was clearly gnawing at him. I could sense his frustration, and I have to confess I was starting to enjoy it. If he was going to make me work to get his story, I would make him work, too. And then he stopped picking up the phone. I started to worry that maybe I had enjoyed the game too much and had alienated him altogether, when out of the blue I got a summons.

  It was well past dark when I made my way up the driveway to Ken Ely’s cottage. I had never been there before, but it was just as I had imagined it, a two-room cabin just big enough to hold Ken and his wife, Emmagene, the love of his life, and his three most prized possessions, a 12-gauge for turkeys, a .30-06 for bucks, and a .22 for squirrel, which, I would later learn, could also be useful for other varmints. Not far from the house there was a pile of stones, a cairn that Ken liked to call the grave of Chief Red Rock. The name was nonsense, of course. Ken never really believed the story his father used to tell about how that particular stack of stones was actually the final resting place of a Munsee Indian sachem who wanted to leave for the next world from the same deer leap where he had had so many successes as a great hunter. More likely, some old farmer trying, like everybody else, to scratch a living out of this flinty, unforgiving land had piled the damned things there to get them out of his way. But Ken still liked to tell the story. He would even embroider it sometimes to give the impression that there was a powerful spirit watching out for this particular piece of land.

  I could tell that Ken was ill at ease with me, and I didn’t want to jump right in. So I tried to make small talk. I asked him about his guns.

  “You don’t ever ask a man about his guns,” Ken snorted.

  There was no way to go but forward. “Well, I don’t mind talking about mine,” I offered. I told him how I had become addicted to black powder hunting, how I had given up using anything more modern and now preferred to hunt during the ten-day stretch right after Christmas reserved exclusively for hunters using weapons that—technologically speaking—date to the late eighteenth century. (I didn’t tell him I had hocked my gun; I didn’t think Ken would have understood that.) He smiled, but thinly. I could tell immediately that he was not impressed. I was either an idiot or a dilettante. What other possible reason could there be to use an ancient fire stick like that when there were so many reliable, accurate modern weapons readily available? “I like it because it means I only get one shot and I have to make it count,” I added. “Uh-huh,” was all he said.

  We were sitting there, circling each other verbally, when the telephone rang. Ken got up and limped around the back of my chair and into the section of the cottage reserved as the living room. “That’s gonna be Emmagene,” he said. “She’s working tonight. Works a lot of nights.”

  It’s very difficult to explain what happened then. I glanced over my shoulder, surreptitiously at first, and I could see immediately that there was a complete change in Ken’s demeanor. It was as if the whole room had suddenly gotten brighter. All that rock-hard tension in him was gone. His voice was playful and warm. “Yeah, that writer fella is here. We’re talking about hunting. No, I don’t think that’s what he really wants to talk about, either. Yeah, he says he’s from over near the Williams … Yes. I’ll be nice.” They didn’t talk long, and as he hung up he caught me staring at him. I think I might have been smiling.

  He walked back to the chair, still light, still grinning.

  “I fell in love with her when I was nineteen, and I waited my whole life for her,” he said without any prodding from me. Turned out they had met when he was just a young buck who had signed up with the Air Force to keep from being drafted, like many of his neighbors, and sent off to fight in some rice paddy in the Mekong Delta. Instead, he found himself stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base just outside Great Falls, Montana, where he fell under the spell of a beautiful young woman, half Chippewa, half Filipina. Her name was Emmagene, and she was barely sixteen at the time. She was eighteen when she got pregnant and had a son. Neither of them was ready to get married, and they decided to put the child up for adoption. Ken left his name with the woman behind the desk at the adoption agency, “just in case he ever wants to find out about me,” he explained.

  They lost track of each other. Emmagene married someone else. Ken did, too. And when his first wife died in a car crash, he married another someone else. It didn’t last. And then one day, out of nowhere, Ken’s long-lost son, now a grown man, tracked him down and let him know that Emmagene was alive and well and living in Florida. In all those years, Ken had never stopped loving Emmagene, he told me, never stopped thinking about her, and after her own marriage failed, Ken finally reached out to her. Eventually he talked her into joining him in Dimock. It didn’t really take much persuading. The truth is, Emmagene had never stopped loving Ken, either.

  “I’m a lucky man,” he said. Maybe he could tell by the look in my eyes that the love story had touched me. Maybe Emmagene said something to hi
m on the phone, or maybe it was just a coincidence, but right at that moment Ken finally made up his mind that even if he couldn’t figure out who I used to be, I was now a guy worth talking to.

  THE WAY HE TOLD IT, it wasn’t Victoria’s bluntness that irked him in that first encounter as much as her attitude. She seemed typical of a breed of newcomers, people who act like they know the place because they can name the little villages that dot the highway, places so small you’d need a magnifying glass to find them on a map. They always seemed to be looking down their noses at people like him. But as hard as he had tried to ignore his new neighbor, there was something about her that had gotten under his skin. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t grown up in these hills and didn’t understand what he and the others who lived there did: that what a man does on his own land is his own business. It was that she did live here now and somehow that made her think she had a vote on what he did with his land, or at least the right to state her opinion. And that was what Ken couldn’t abide. As he put it to me, she didn’t seem to understand that this isn’t some vacation spot, some pristine corner of the wild that could be pressed into the pages of a book like an old corsage. The land was all Ken and most of his neighbors had. In the past, people like Ken had taken from it whatever their abilities and the particular limitations of their own land would allow—corn, milk, timber, stones—and if that wasn’t enough (and it usually wasn’t), they’d take a little more. But for most, the days when you could make a living farming the land, and maybe timbering it a bit, were over. The farms were largely gone. And that meant that you could either carve up the cadaver of the land and sell off small chunks to the folks like Victoria, or you could carve out what you needed and measure it in tons. Ken had chosen the latter. Still, he never took more than the land was willing, however grudgingly, to give. And the land was more resilient than people like Victoria realized. You could tear it up with plows and bury it under mountains of fertilizer, you could hack down its trees and blast out its rocks with dynamite, you could ship the shards of rock down to the valley where rich people would use them to put facades on their McMansions or build little stone walls to evoke that fake country charm so prized these days. But the minute you stopped plowing or digging or blasting, the land would start to come back. Sure, you could kill it if you were greedy or careless enough. You could dig too deep, take too many trees, poison the land or the water with fertilizer; but if you did that, you knew you’d have nothing left at all.