Atlas Shrugged [392]
The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him-man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to-oh, stop it!
Stop it-she told herself in quiet severity, when the scream of the wounded stranger was choked off-don't think of that, don't look too far, you like building this path, build it, don't look beyond the foot of the hill.
She had driven a few times to the store in Woodstock, twenty miles away, to buy supplies and food. Woodstock was a small huddle of dying structures, built generations ago for some reason and hope long since forgotten. There was no railroad to feed it, no electric power, nothing but a county highway growing emptier year by year.
The only store was a wooden hovel, with spider-eaten corners and a rotted patch in the middle of the floor, eaten by the rains that came through the leaking roof. The storekeeper was a fat, pallid woman who moved with effort, but seemed indifferent to her own discomfort. The stock of food consisted of dusty cans with faded labels, some grain, and a few vegetables rotting in ancient bins outside the door. "Why don't you move those vegetables out of the sun?" Dagny asked once. The woman looked at her blankly, as if unable to understand the possibility of such a question. "They've always been there," she answered indifferently.
Driving back to the cabin, Dagny looked up at a mountain stream that fell with ferocious force down a sheer granite wall, its spray hanging like a mist of rainbows in the sun. She thought that one could build a hydroelectric plant, just large enough to supply the power for her cabin and for the town of Woodstock-Woodstock could be made to be productive-those wild apple trees she saw in such unusual numbers among the dense growth on the hillsides, were the remnants of orchards-suppose one were to reclaim them, then build a small spur to the nearest railroad-oh, stop it!
"No kerosene today," the storekeeper told her on her next trip to Woodstock. "It rained Thursday night, and when it rains, the trucks can't get through Fairfield gorge, the road's flooded, and the kerosene truck won't be back this way till next month." "If you know that the road gets flooded every time it rains, why don't you people repair it?"
The woman answered, "The road's always been that way."
Driving back, Dagny stopped on the crest of a hill and looked down at the miles of countryside below. She looked at Fairfield gorge where the county road, twisting through marshy soil below the level of a river, got trapped in a crack between two hills. It would be simple to bypass those hills, she thought, to build a road on the other side of the river-the people of Woodstock had nothing to do, she could teach them-cut a road straight to the southwest, save miles, connect with the state highway at the freight depot of-oh, stop it!
She put her kerosene lamp aside and sat in her cabin after dark by the light of a candle, listening to the music of a small portable