Freedom [173]
Deeper in the country, the scenes were less discouraging. Remoteness brought the relief of no people: no people meant more everything else. Lalitha swerved violently around a grouse on the road, a grouse greeter, an avian goodwill ambassador inviting appreciation of the brawnier forestation and less marred heights and clearer streams of Wyoming County. Even the weather was brightening for them.
“I want you,” Walter said.
She shook her head. “Don’t say anything else, OK? We still have work to do. Let’s just do our jobs and then see.”
He was tempted to make her stop at one of the little rustic picnic areas along Black Jewel Creek (of which the Nine Mile was a principal tributary), but it would be irresponsible, he thought, to lay a hand on her again until he was certain he was ready. Delay was bearable if gratification was assured. And the beauty of the land up here, the sweet spore-laden dampness of the early-spring air, was so assuring him.
It was after six by the time they reached the turnoff for Forster Hollow. Walter had expected to encounter heavy truck and earth-moving-equipment traffic on the Nine Mile road, but there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Instead they found deep tire and tractor chewings in the mud. Where the woods encroached, freshly broken branches were lying on the ground and dangling lamely from the overarching trees.
“Looks like somebody got here early,” Walter said.
Lalitha was applying gas in fitful spurts, fishtailing the car in the mud, veering dangerously close to the road’s edge to avoid the larger fallen branches.
“I almost wonder if they got here yesterday,” Walter said. “I wonder if they misunderstood and brought the equipment in yesterday to get an early start.”
“They did have the legal right, as of noon.”
“But that’s not what they told us. They told us six a.m. today.”
“Yes, but they’re coal companies, Walter.”
They came to one of the narrowest pinches in the road and found it roughly bulldozed and chainsawed, the tree trunks pushed down into the ravine below. Lalitha revved the engine and shimmied and jounced across a hastily graded stretch of mud and stone and stump. “Glad this is a rental car!” she said as she accelerated zestfully onto the clearer road beyond.
Two miles farther up, at the boundary of property now belonging to the Trust, the road was blocked by a couple of passenger cars backed up in front of a chainlink gate being assembled by workers in orange vests. Walter could see Jocelyn Zorn and some of her women conferring with a hard-hatted manager who was holding a clipboard. In another, not too dissimilar world, Walter might have been friends with Jocelyn Zorn. She resembled the Eve in the famous altarpiece painting by van Eyck; she was pallid and dull-eyed and somewhat macrocephalic-looking in the highness of her hairline. But she had a fine, unsettling cool, an unflappability suggestive of irony, and was the sort of bitter salad green for which Walter ordinarily had a fondness. She came down the road to meet him and Lalitha as they were stepping out into the mud.
“Good morning, Walter,” she said. “Can you explain what’s going on here?”
“Looks like some road improvement,” he said disingenuously.
“There’s a lot of dirt going in the creek. It’s already turbid halfway to the Black Jewel. I’m not seeing much in the way of erosion mitigation here. Less than none, actually.”
“We’ll talk to them about that.”
“I’ve asked DEP to come up and have a look. I imagine they’ll get here by June or so. Did you buy them off, too?”
Through the brown spatters on the bumper of the rearmost car Walter could read the message been done by nardone.
“Let’s rewind a little bit, Jocelyn,” he said. “Can we step back and look at the bigger picture?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the dirt in the stream. I’m also interested in what’s happening beyond the fence.”
“What’s happening is we’re preserving sixty-five thousand acres of roadless woodland for eternity.