Saving Shadow Mountain

By Ralph Bowden

Shadow Mountain defines the tiny remnant community of Shadow Valley in East Tennessee where the local pit mine closed in 1981. For many years since, Elsie, who has always lived in Shadow Valley, has been the sole caregiver of her father, a former miner with black lung disease. Now middle-aged and resigned to her narrow existence, Elsie is suddenly confronted with with the threat of mountaintop removal mining. It would destroy her life space and make living in Shadow Valley intolerable. She is also convinced it is deeply wrong. This is the story of her struggle to save the mountain. In the process, her life expands in ways she never could have predicted, and she finds reserves and abilities she never dreamed she had as she develops new communication and manipulation skills. Then she falls in love with the agent of the land development company that is trying to sell out to a coal company. Can the relationship and the mountain be saved?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ralph Bowden
• Release date: Aug 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463128299

Ralph Bowden

Ralph Bowden has entertained himself by writing mostly fiction for almost 30 years, through and following careers as an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry, a history professor, a home builder, an alternative energy consultant, an instructional designer, and a technical writer. Twenty-six novels, four story collections, a volume of collected short fiction, and a three-act play reside, mostly unread, on his hard drive. He likes all of his word children. Realistically, some of them are probably flawed and maybe even terrible. Others might entertain readers besides himself, but Ralph hasn't the time or ego drive to promote and sell, nor the stomach for collecting rejection letters. Self-publishing avoids all that and is quick. If somebody finds and likes what he has written, fine. If not, the world will go on (or not) just the same.

Book preview

Chapter 1.

Was that thunder? Surely not, on a Monday morning in early November when rare bright sun blazed the top of Shadow Mountain behind their house. While the sun didn’t reach their backyard until mid morning this time of year, Elsie could see it already pushing down the shadow.

No, the rumble was continuous, more like a big truck coming along the barely two-lane blacktop that served as Shadow Valley’s main – really only – street. Narrow and crooked as it was, and because it didn’t start or end anyplace important, big trucks hardly ever used the route. So when one did come along, it was an event.

Elsie looked up from the sink and pulled the curtain aside. The rumbling grew louder until a truck went by pulling a trailer with a large bulldozer. She didn’t immediately recognize the machine on the trailer behind the second truck. Maybe a rock drilling rig? Yes, the drillers had used something like it to put down their well, back when she was still in high school and Vernon was working in the mine.

She stepped into the living room, where Vernon was listening to that Limbaugh man on the radio. Road work? he wheezed.

Could be, Elsie said. Maybe they’ll straighten out the grade crossing at Smith’s bend.

About time. Vernon’s chest heaved, gasping.

Those weren’t county trucks, though. She checked his oxygen tank, which was low, and swapped it out.

Vernon just grunted. It was too hard for him to talk, even with a new tank.

She went back to the kitchen and her dishes.

Later that morning, as she was hanging out the clothes, Elsie heard the bulldozer at work. It was on their side of the valley and not far away, surely closer than Smith’s bend. She was just hanging the last sock when she heard the rock drill compressor fire up and then the drill itself start to chatter. Were they working at the old Lawson place, clearing to build and drilling a well?

The sun was down to Elsie’s backyard clothesline now and warming things. It was only 11:00. She wouldn’t have to start lunch for half an hour, so she walked out to the county road and turned north. Kingfisher Branch, just on the other side of the road, was way down. It was usually roaring along this time of year, but the fall had been dry. She’d had to stop the washing machine this morning to let the well recover before the rinse cycle. Surely the winter rains would begin soon.

She didn’t have to walk far to see what was going on. It looked as if they had started in the driveway to the old Lawson place. The grade up to where the house had burned was easy, and they hadn’t needed to do much but scrape the ruts and side ditches flat. They were making the new driveway much wider than the old one. The bulldozer and rock drill were working now beyond the yard, out in what had been the pasture, grown up for several years. It was steeper there. They’d have a time cutting in a wide road if they kept heading up. Bedrock wasn’t down but a foot or so on most of Shadow Mountain. Ledges pushed out through the dirt in places. It dawned on her that the rock drill wasn’t doing a well. It was making holes for blasting.

Elsie stood in the newly bulldozed roadbed for a minute to watch the work until an air horn nearly blew her down. The bulldozer and drill compressor had drowned the noise of a big gravel truck now aimed at her. Elsie jumped out of the way. It charged by, and started a dump without stopping, making it from where she’d been standing almost up to the old house site before emptying out. As soon as its box was down, it backed out over the loose gravel and across the county road into Kingfisher Branch to turn around before roaring off. These people were in a hurry, and none too particular. The bulldozer had gouged out a chunk of the huge red oak across from where the house had been, and the high dump truck box had ripped two big branches from the sugar maple next to it.

Elsie walked back along the county road breathing the diesel scent. As she reached her own yard, another gravel truck came barreling through town. Good thing there weren’t any kids in Shadow Valley these days. Thirty years ago, the road was their playground for skating, biking, and ball games.

Back in the house, the noise wasn’t so bad. Aunt Jeeper had come over from her trailer across the road. She and Vernon wanted the news.

Looks like they mean to cut a big road sidelong up Shadow Mountain, Elsie told them. I’d guess they’re heading toward the gap where the rail line used to come through.

You don’t s’pose they’re fixin’ to open the mine again, are they? Jeeper asked. Truck out the coal?

Mine’s not worth it, Vernon said. Coal seam’s too thin.

While Jeeper talked at her brother in the living room, Elsie went in the kitchen and fixed lunch. Scenes of 1981 drifted by. That was a dividing year in Elsie’s life. She and Buck Lawson, the last and most serious of several boyfriends, had just graduated from high school. They were talking marriage. She was going to take courses at the community college in Rogerton while he worked at the mine. But it closed. Nothing else for him to do in Shadow Valley, so he enlisted. It was a good time. He hadn’t even had to go on the Grenada invasion. When he came back from the service, trained in airplane maintenance, he got a job in Atlanta. Mama got sick, Elsie had to stay home, and Buck found a new girl.

Jeeper was just waddling into the kitchen when a great crashing boom shook the house and rattled back and forth across the valley.

Jumping Jeefosahat! she squalled. You’d think they’d come by and tell us. Lordamercy, poor Sweetbaby! He’s like to tear the house down. Worser’n thunder. She hobbled out the front door, leaving her cane behind, and did a bow-legged trot across the front yard, the road, and over the little bridge to her own yard. Elsie could hear Jeeper’s old mutt howling frantically inside the mobile home.

Elsie was mad. There’s no excuse for that! Whatever they’re doing with their stupid road couldn’t be so all-fired important they can’t take time off to let us know what’s going on.

Not illegal. Nothin’ you can do, Vernon said.

Elsie normally didn’t go against her father, but she was steamed, and charged out. At least I’ll find out what they’re doing, she called, as she headed toward the car.

She drove up the new gravel to the old Lawson yard, parked, and walked the rest of the way, to where the dozer and rock drill were working again well out in the pasture scrub.

When she got close enough and the dozer operator was turned toward her, she waved her arms. At first, it looked as if he tried not to see her, but then he throttled back and waited for her to come close enough to shout over the rock drill noise beyond. He used the break to light a cigarette.

Y’all going to be doing more of that? Blasting? she bellowed. Obviously they did, since the drill was still at work.

Yup. Rock here’s pretty hard, he answered.

How soon? How about giving us a heads up first?

He snorted smoke out his nose. They don’t pay us for that.

Who’s ‘they’? Elsie demanded.

Folks that own this property, he put his hand on the throttle.

Who’s that? she tried again.

He took a big drag and sighed. Look, when you hear this dozer and the compressor shut down, he waved his cigarette at the rock drill, you can figure 15-20 minutes. We’re working up the hill away from y’all. It won’t be so bad in a day or so. The engine roared, the dozer skidded around and clanked off for another pass at the newly loosened rock rubble.

It wasn’t much. She walked back to the car, determined to find out what this was all about.

That afternoon, while the sun lasted and Vernon napped, she walked south along the county road a quarter mile to what used to be downtown Shadow Valley. There wasn’t much left. The biggest building in town was the empty, boarded-up Valley Hardware Store that Vernon had bought in 1981, right after the mine closed. Elsie had run the business for nineteen years, the best years of her life – though that wasn’t saying much, if she stopped to think about it. When they closed for good in 2000, they never even tried to sell the store. Who would have bought it if they had? So the building had sat there, derelict, for six years.

Across the road, her buddy Otto had run Otto’s Autos: parts, repair, and gas. It too was boarded up. The gas pumps – the pre-digital kind with a button on the side to reset the numbers – were still standing, reading 92.9 cents for regular. Eight or ten junk cars were rusting into the ground beside and behind the shop. Kudzu vine had pretty well taken them over, making big green-carpeted lumps all summer. This time of year, after several light frosts, the lumps looked like piles of old rags. Otto had closed down the day his mother finally died in 1999, and couldn’t wait to leave town. Two days later, after Elsie had helped him pack and they were crying together over a couple furtive Budweisers in his shop’s back room, he confessed he was gay. Elsie had figured as much, but he’d not been able to say it to anybody, even her, while his mother lived. Though he promised to write, Elsie never heard from him again, which left a big hole in her life. They had sometimes gone out together, bowling in Rogerton or fishing in Norris Lake, back when Vernon could still manage on his own. Since Otto left, she really had nobody to confide in or unload on.

Shadow Valley wasn’t completely closed and gone, though. Next to Otto’s shop stood the Shadow Valley First Independent Missionary Baptist Church. It needed paint, but at least it was still there, and the dozen or so cars and pickups parked by it on a Sunday morning spoke to the continuing hold the Lord had on the hearts and minds of the area’s faithful. Or something. The faithful were getting older, and probably increasingly concerned that the Lord notice their faithfulness, even though much of their religion, Elsie suspected, was habit and the need to get out and see folks. She knew that’s what kept her going to church, though she didn’t like to admit it even to herself.

The Pastor, Brother Jim Cason, a big, handsome man of 32, was another reason. He clearly still had the living spirit. His dedication to keeping the church alive, on top of his full time job with the highway department, moved Elsie. Her duties as a deaconess were little enough compared to Brother Jim’s commitment. And his pretty young wife, Janelle, and three adorable children lit her up like nothing else, though thinking about them sometimes gave her the weepies.

Brother Jim might know about the new road, but he was at work today, so Elsie kept walking, past the empty lot where the old schoolhouse used to be, where she had started elementary school in 1968. The flood of 1977 had taken it away, along with the two houses next to it and the town’s other church, the Old Regular Baptists.

Another gravel truck roared by as she walked in front of a couple house trailers, set well back from Kingfisher branch, toward the south end of downtown. One of them belonged to Crazy Mickey, another ex-miner who lived by himself. Elsie didn’t remember his last name, if she ever knew it. People always referred to him by his title, which was because of the yard around his trailer. It was piled high with every imaginable sort of junk – appliances, old truck parts, lamps, children’s tricycles and play sets, even a piano. He had collected it all over the years when he had a truck that ran and he could drive, which hadn’t been for probably ten years now. So mold, rot and rust were gradually working down the piles of his hoarded treasures, as weeds and saplings worked up through.

The other trailer belonged to poor Hazel, the widow Jackson, who had to deal with her two grown sons who lived there and ate out of her kitchen and left junk cars and trucks in her yard. They didn’t really live there. They crashed there most of the time when they were too drunk to go anywhere else.

The little grocery that the Saxon family had run for longer than Elsie could remember was still open at the south end of downtown. It had bent with the times, and was now more of a convenience store. According to Mamie Saxon, who lived in a ratty old house next door with three and sometimes four of her children, they made just enough from the gas, bait, ice, cold beer, and packaged junk food to stay open. They had recently started to rent videos, too, which probably helped. But rumor was that what really kept them in business was a more lucrative product, marketed by Mamie’s oldest boy, Nate, out back. That was the only way to account for the steady stream of cars and trucks that swung behind the store and then emerged a few minutes later with the windows rolling up. They weren’t the same ones that parked in the church lot on Sunday morning.

There was a board bench outside between the drink machines and the pay phone. Elsie eased herself down on it and sat in the sun, which felt good, though she’d hardly walked half a mile. She was out of shape, and carrying around at least 30 pounds more of herself than there needed to be. She knew she should stop eating what Vernon insisted she feed him, which was a meat and potatoes diet. It didn’t fatten him up, but she had to watch it. She really should make herself more salads, but fixing food wasn’t her favorite activity. Nor was nursing, for that matter.

Life wasn’t a matter of choices, though; you did what you had to, as it came at you, and put aside what might have been. Long-term dreams – and she’d been full of them while growing up – had become ever more impossible as first the hardware business and then Vernon got sicker. Her imaginative marketing gimmicks hadn’t saved the business, and her conscientious care wouldn’t save her father.

While Elsie rested, the last gravel truck came back, empty now, and pulled off the road in front of Saxon’s. The driver, a skinny guy in jeans, tattoos, and wrap-around sunglasses, came toward the front door.

So what’s going on out at the Lawson place? Elsie asked him.

He didn’t stop. Lawson place? What’s that?

The old farm where you guys are clearing a road, Elsie said.

Oh. That’s right: clearing a road. I’m bringing gravel for it. He started in the door.

Where’s it going? Elsie persisted.

What? The road? Up the mountain, I guess. He disappeared inside.

He was as helpful as the dozer driver. They knew what was going on, but either had been ordered not to say, or figured it would make their life easier to play dumb. They surely expected hostility. No local would appreciate the noise and truck traffic on the normally quiet county road.

Elsie hoisted herself up and went in the door, nearly bumping into the truck driver on the way out. He was putting one can of Skoal into a hind pocket and opening the other for a fresh chew. He didn’t stop to chat.

Mamie herself was on duty behind the counter, watching a soap on her snowy little rabbit ears TV and eating a frozen custard cone. Big, fake-blond Mamie. If Elsie needed to shrink herself by 30 pounds, Mamie could stand to shed 100. But after two disastrous marriages and five kids with three different men, she had pretty much given up, and didn’t care if she was fat and flabby. She would wear what she wanted, too, which were cutoff overalls over a tee shirt advertising Miller Lite.

Elsie, girl. How’s it going? Mamie asked. They had begun grade school in the same class, and knew each other’s sins over the years. Mamie had accumulated more of them, Elsie suspected, though she tried not to judge. Like Elsie, Mamie had just responded to what came down life’s stream at her, after all. But she’d been out there in the current while Elsie had stayed over close to the bank.

I guess I’ll make it, Elsie sighed. How about you?

Mamie shrugged. Same old, same old. My feet hurt. She was glued to the tube. Look there, he’s going to walk out on her. I can’t believe some men! Just because she slipped up one time and was dumb enough to tell him. He’s been stepping out and getting a piece whenever he felt like it.

An ad came on and she turned back to Elsie. What do you know about these trucks? And the blasting? It’s up by you, isn’t it?

I was going to ask you, Elsie said. They’re putting in a road across the old Lawson place. Heading up toward the gap. I can see that much, but they won’t say what’s going on.

I know. I asked that guy who was just in here. ‘Just haulin’ gravel where they tell me,’ he says. That’s bullshit. I’ll bet they’re setting up to blow the top off the mountain to get at the coal.

What? Shadow Mountain? You mean like strip mine it? Elsie said.

Only worse. Fella came through here, must have been a month or so ago, said that’s what they were doing up his way in Kentucky. Made a Godawful mess, he said. They just fill the valley in, make it all flat.

‘Fill the valley in’? Shadow Valley? They can’t do that! Can they? Elsie said.

Mamie shrugged again, heavily, lifting and spreading her breasts out on either side of her overall bib for a moment. Probably. You remember prospectors were up there a couple days last summer, drilling and thumping around.

They were? When? I didn’t know that.

Oh, it was late June, early July, right before that congressman – what’s his name, Baswell? – came through with his goons, shaking everybody’s hand. Weren’t you here? Mamie asked.

That’s when Daddy was in the hospital. Jeeper and I stayed in Rogerton a week or more with Mama’s cousin.

Yeah, well everybody knows there’s still lots of coal. They don’t go underground to get it any more. They just take off everything above it with huge shovels. Blasting, roaring machines, dust, trucks . . . it’ll ruin what’s left of this place. That’s probably what Baswell meant when he bragged about what he was going to do for us. ‘Economic development and prosperity.’ Sure. Thanks a lot.

Chapter 2.

On her way home, Elsie walked faster, thinking and worrying. Would she, Vernon, and Jeeper be able to stay if Mamie was right? Would they want to? The house she had lived in all her life was Vernon’s, inherited from his father. It sat on a few acres, one of them across the road and Kingfisher Branch. That’s where Aunt Jeeper had moved her mobile home after uncle George died six years before.

The property to the north, a few acres of grown up pasture along the road, had changed hands several times as people died off. Elsie had no idea who owned it now. North of that was the Lawson farm. Somebody must have bought it after the house burned in the winter of 1999. Festis Lawson had been living there alone. He was pretty old, and everybody suspected the fire was his fault. They took him off to a nursing home. Brother Jim saw Festis’ obituary a few months later in the Dreyer County Gazette, and announced it in church, though the Lawsons had never attended, much less been saved.

The Lawson farm was big, but probably not worth much with a burned out house and stripped timber. Festis had the steep land above his pasture logged back in ’89 or ‘90, ‘cashing in his insurance,’ as Vernon had commented. The loggers had gone a good ways up Shadow Mountain, bulldozing, ripping up, skidding down logs and leaving brush and gullies. Kingfisher Branch ran muddy after every big rain for a couple years. Folks blamed the flood of ’92 on logging, but old Festis swore it wasn’t his doing. Elsie remembered the arguments in the hardware store, where local men gathered in the winter when they had neither work or much to do on their land.

Probably, Buck Lawson or his sister, Becca, had put the old place up for sale after Festis was gone. Elsie hardly ever went out the county road to the north. In fact, until this morning, she couldn’t remember being out that way in several years, so she wouldn’t have seen a real estate sign go up or come down.

Maybe she needed to look up Buck or Becca. They could tell her who owned the property now. If it was a coal company, she’d know Mamie was right. But how could she ‘look up’ the Lawson kids? She hadn’t heard from Buck – now 43, like her – in 20 years. Nobody she knew would know where they might be. Any community knowledge made the rounds immediately at church, and if she missed something, Aunt Jeeper could be counted on to pick it up and crow it around.

Where would she start? She knew that people could find out practically anything on the internet – she’d seen that on television – but she had no computer or connection. It was a whole foreign world to her.

Wednesday night, after Bible study, Elsie asked Brother Jim. He and Janelle lived a couple miles out toward Van Buren, so he didn’t know anything about the new road.

It’s not a county project, he said. I can tell you that for sure. I don’t like the sound of it. They may just be loggers, I suppose.

There’s not much timber up there. Old Festis had it logged off …well, I guess it has been 16 years, now.

It won’t matter. They’ll take anything and everything. It just goes for chips, pulp, newsprint, you know. I’ve heard they sell to the Japanese. We’re doing a big repaving project down on route 30 all week or I’d stop in the county courthouse to see what I could find out.

I’ve got to take Daddy into Rogerton Friday for his appointment with Doc Witherspoon. Where do I go in the courthouse and what do I look up?

Ask in the assessor’s office who owns the property now. Maybe they’ll have a map of it, too .... I need to stop by and see your father first chance I get. How’s he doing?

Not real good. He has to have an oxygen tank and tubes all the time now, and getting him in and out of his wheelchair’s a job. Elsie didn’t go into the other problems her father was starting to have. The poor man needed some privacy and dignity. She hadn’t even told Aunt Jeeper – who was at the door with her gossip buddies waiting for Elsie to give her a ride the quarter mile home in the cold drizzle.

Thursday morning, it cleared again, but the forecast was for temperatures in the teens overnight, the first hard frost of the fall. Elsie was outside most of Thursday putting her garden to bed for the season, plucking the last tiny cherry tomatoes, the cabbages, and fall greens.

As the dozer driver had predicted, the noise receded as they worked their way north and up Shadow Mountain. But the blasting was still a jolt and rattled the whole valley every time – four times on Thursday. They must be up in the steeper part now where they had to cut deeper into the hillside. When the loggers had taken out the trees before, they hadn’t put in a road first. That was summer, though, when the ground was harder. And they had only taken out the bigger trees, not everything, as Brother Jim said they did now.

But whatever kind of logging they did couldn’t be as bad as blowing the top off of Shadow Mountain and filling in Shadow Valley or Fresh Creek valley on the other side! Elsie couldn’t believe they could get away with that, though she couldn’t claim to know much about current events. Vernon watched Fox news every night, and snorted – when he had breath enough – about the godless chicken liberal Democrats. But Elsie only heard some of it and was too busy with what she was doing do to worry about how awful everything was worldwide, or in Washington, or Nashville, or even in Rogerton, the Dreyer county seat.

Friday morning woke crisp and cold, like they said, with heavy frost on everything. Vernon’s appointment was at 9:30, so Elsie had to hustle. Getting her father from his wheelchair into the car was a job these days. While he’d lost a lot of weight in recent years, he was still a big man, now stiff and weak.

They made it to Dr. Witherspoon’s office, beside the Dreyer County Regional Medical Center, just barely on time after the 40 minute drive. The visit went as usual, with Doc recommending again as much exercise as Vernon could stand, both to keep his flexibility and mobility up, and to increase blood flow to his lungs.

Vernon, as usual, said nothing. Elsie was in charge of communications. She didn’t tell Doc that Vernon never did the exercises. Doc told her that Vernon’s respiratory function was steadily declining. They didn’t need to tell Vernon that. It was an awful way to put in your last years, gasping for breath.

Damn the mine anyway, and the Fresh Creek Coal Company, which had folded so it wouldn’t have pensions or health benefits to pay its former employees. Vernon had saved while he worked at the mine, and they got a monthly check from a stock annuity that had done very well. He also got his social security and miner’s disability benefits, so for the time being they were all right financially, with no mortgage or car payments going out. Medicare and prescription drug insurance took care of what little the medical profession could do. What she’d do after ...well, she didn’t want to think about that. She had enough to do each day without dwelling on either the past or the future, though sometimes when lying awake at night she would treat herself to some fantasy hope, and remind herself that she was still only 43, with no gray hairs, few wrinkles in her perfect complexion, and while no hot young babe, basically not bad looking, especially if she could ever work off the extra pounds.

As usual, Elsie did the week’s grocery shopping after the doctor visit. She ran through her and Jeeper’s lists quickly so she’d have time in the county courthouse. Still, she couldn’t allow herself more than 20 minutes in there, with Vernon waiting in the car. She got as far as the tax assessor’s office, where they managed to look up the property she described and informed her it now belonged to Regal Resource Group, which didn’t tell her much. But the helpful clerk in the tax office said the registrar of deeds should be able to show her the details, the date of sale and the description of the property. There was no time, though.

By the time she got back to the car, Vernon complained he was cold and had to use the bathroom, which meant getting him out and into his wheelchair and finding the courthouse men’s room. Fortunately, it was marked as handicapped accessible. She hoped he could manage without her in there.

On the way home, Elsie told him what she’d found.

‘Regal Resource Group?’ Prob’ly a coal company, he said. Nothing you can do about it.

Brother Jim said they might just be loggers.

Sure, they’ll log first. Then strip. Nothing you …. he was too winded to repeat himself.

She didn’t get out much these days, but remembered seeing strip mines years ago over on the Plateau. It was pretty bad at first, but they had graded it back and planted grass, and after a few years the whole area looked like a big pasture. She had seen the stripping in Scott, Campbell, and Anderson counties too, where they gouged out the sides of mountains, leaving terraces and vertical, bare, rock walls. But Mamie said these days they just blew the whole top off to get at the coal. Elsie tried to imagine what Shadow Mountain would look like after that. She’d grown up looking out her bedroom window at a forested mountain. Could they really just blast it all away?

Chapter 3.

The road builders finished in 10 days. The valley was quiet again, with no more blasting or gravel trucks. But Elsie’s life thickened up, first with the cold Vernon caught, probably at Dr. Witherspoon’s office. It was a pretty serious thing, given his condition, but he was on the mend by Thanksgiving.

That was the second of Elsie’s trials. Aunt Jeeper and Uncle George’s kids, in-laws and grandchildren always came by, an endless stream of them, it seemed, and Elsie’s older brother, Vernon Jr., and his wife and their two kids. They lived in Birmingham and made the trip Thanksgiving or Christmas, sometimes during spring school break, and every summer, usually for a week. Elsie was lucky. Her relatives were all decent people who generally got along. But it was a lot of work for her, bedding and food, even with plenty of help.

The day after everybody left, Elsie herself came down with some respiratory thing. She had been careful to isolate Vernon from the little bug carriers, but they all had lots of hugs for Aunt Elsie. Probably worth it. The household was still a mess by the first of December, though. Many things had slid.

She was still hacking and coughing some, though it was looser, by Monday, December fourth. The household routines were mostly back on track by then, so she was lying in bed late – almost 7:30 – when a truck went by. It wasn’t a dump truck or anything heavy, but she didn’t recognize the sound as one of the usual. It reminded her: they hadn’t put that road up across the Lawson place for nothing. Sooner or later, something was going to happen over there.

Vernon called. She got up.

Later, sitting with a magazine as the Monday morning wash load sloshed and Vernon grogged beside the radio in the living room, she reviewed her intentions to go over and see the finished road, where and how far it went, and to go back to the county courthouse and look up the deed to the property that now belonged to Regal Resource Group. Did it go only to the top, or did it include Fresh Creek Valley on the other side and the whole range of ridges and valleys beyond? There had been some talk a few years ago of adding the area onto a new nature preserve farther west, but the proposal hadn’t gone anywhere.

Elsie had hiked up Shadow Mountain often as a teenager and wandered around in the mountainous wilderness beyond, following Fresh Creek for miles above and below the mine. Whenever she needed to be by herself, she went into the woods, a luxury she hadn’t enjoyed in probably 25 years. Maybe it was time again, while she still could.

She wasn’t a teenager now, though. Any exertion on a raw day like this Monday morning would wipe her out and set her to coughing. And there was Vernon. She could usually leave him for an hour or two. If she had to be gone longer, as on shopping day to Rogerton, Jeeper would come over. But Elsie always had to schedule around Jeeper’s soaps, which Vernon wouldn’t tolerate. She also had to make sure he wouldn’t need a new tank or help in the bathroom while she was gone. If Jeeper couldn’t do it – and her own fragile health often got in the way – Elsie would have to go to Hazel Jackson, who was always more than glad to help out, though Vernon grumbled about how much she would gabble, and about having to pay her. Hazel protested payment, of course, but Elsie knew how tightly stretched she was, month to month.

Well, maybe she could slip away for a few minutes right now. She checked Vernon and the washing machine, which hadn’t reached the first spin cycle yet, grabbed her coat, went out to the car, and drove up to the new road. There was an anonymous ‘no trespassing’ sign on a new, substantial iron post on one side, another iron post on the other side, and a chain between them. But it was unlocked and lying loose on the gravel. She drove in over it. Maybe the truck that had come by earlier had driven in and there would be somebody here she could talk to.

The road builders had done a good job. The gravel was well-packed and the grade was moderate. She drove up across the old pasture quickly. The morning fog had lifted there, but it hung thick at the tree line and she had to slow down. A few hundred yards up into