Chapter Two #2
The road to Shear Adventure Sheep Farm was five miles south of the service station.
They had passed it on their way there, and they passed it on their way back, for the street sign was hidden by a twining vine that someone had forgotten to cut back, or perhaps, they later considered, encouraged.
And Google Maps was having trouble with the signal.
But once they found the road, they were off, the pavement gave way to dirt, the dirt to washboard, and, jiggling and joggling, they hibbered and skibbered along.
A real dirt road! In poor repair! Miles gunned it a little, and Giuseppe bounced around, and Olive giggled, and Wesley shouted, “Faster! Faster!”
Down below tumbled a beautiful little brook, and chipmunks and squirrels dashed between the branches.
From time to time, they passed a habitation—a good encompassing word, for some were more sheds than houses, each with a varied display of signage, that seemed to express, at the heart of American rural experience, a complex relationship toward hospitality:
Children at Play—Beware of Dog
Private Property—Welcome to Our Home
Security Provided by the 2nd Amendment—We Love Our Pugs!
Due to the Price of Bullets, Warning Shots Will Not Be Fired.
“I wonder if that guy babysits?” said Miles.
Kate smiled, but couldn’t bring herself to laugh.
Her brief horror at the food choices at the gas station had been—as she might have said in one of her lectures—textured by the sight of a forlorn-looking woman with all the symptoms of American syndromal poverty struggling along the highway holding a barefoot child, its hand thrust into a bag of Doritos.
She thought then of bringing it up with Olive and Wesley—it would be a teaching opportunity, a chance to delve a little deeper into the complexities of their new home.
Not that there weren’t any poor people in Silicon Valley; they were just better hidden.
But that wasn’t really a good thing, Kate hastened to add, in the imaginary conversation now well under way, and repeated that evening with her husband.
After all, it seemed healthy to be in a place where not everyone was an AI pioneer, where there were children whose parents didn’t select their embryos for high-IQ polygenic scores, who thought it might be just a little wrong to hire a consultant to help a twelve-year-old “craft her life narrative” for future college applications.
Secretly, she was relieved to rescue Olive and Wesley from the shadow of the achievement mills, the summer camps “inspiring disruptors and innovators!,” the kids enrolled in evening Mandarin and weekend Russian Math.
Olive, absorbing but not fully understanding the conversations around her, had named two stuffies Hegemony and Freudenschade.
Beautiful, complex words, granted! But what was happening to childhood? What about “Mouse”? What about “Bear”?
When Kate was growing up, her neighbors had been a schoolteacher and a policeman and a woman who had a stationery shop, and she looked forward to the same in Greensbury.
She just hadn’t considered that a child of the man (it had to be a man, right?) with the “warning shots” sign would also be going to the same school as her children, and that Wesley or Olive might be invited to that child’s house.
Well, they would cross that bridge when they got to it, she thought, a thought felicitously accompanied by the real-life physical world, for they were crossing an actual bridge, or they had begun to cross the actual bridge and stopped.
A massive tree, some kind of conifer—none of the little Californian party knew its name—had fallen across the road, so neatly, so symmetrically, that it looked like it had been plucked from the woods by a fairy-tale giant.
It must have been a recent tumble—the root shield was taller than Miles, and clods of loose dirt still hung from it pendulously.
The family got out and walked around it, marveling at the hole torn in the earth, the rich smell, the stone larger than Olive, which, caught in the roots of the tree, had been lifted nearly ten feet in the air.
“Well!” said Miles. It occurred to him that, in the spirit of adventure, they might continue on foot, but a sheep farm didn’t quite feel worth the trouble; actually, he hadn’t been sure it was worth the trouble in the first place, save that it seemed like something someone should do in Vermont.
It was clear from the state of the road that there weren’t too many families going there today.
So they got back in the car and backed up over the bridge, backed up quite a while—Kate yelling “Slow!” and Olive yelling “Aaaa!” and Wesley, “Go, Dad! Go, Dad!”—along the edge of the high road above the ravine, but he did it, he was brave, he was their father.
At last, they reached a pull-out, and they were headed back down, forward, without a plan.
But nothing could put a damper on their mood.
The forest was lush and mysterious, the morning cool, they still had trail mix, and whatever was in the Coffee Drink was really something.
And they were even luckier than they would ever know, for Shear Adventure had not been Shear Adventure for many, many years, and the person who awaited them four miles up the road beyond the fallen tree was such a terrifying individual that even the guy with the “warning shots” sign kept his distance; in fact, the very motivation for the “warning shots” sign was not the Feds, not environmentalists, not refugees, but the neighbor up the road.
Something powerful—the winds, the rains, the movement of the earth—was on their side, and they didn’t even know it.
Miles cranked up the volume on Watership Down.
—
They did find some classic amusements that first full day as country people.
A few miles north of the service station was an orchard selling ice cream and maple candies, and a few miles north of there, they reached a small town with a classic New England church, not a church converted into a loft or a restaurant, but a true, functional church with bells ringing, and New English people walking benevolently from its doors, and beyond that was a baseball field where baseball was being played on true grass, not drought-resistant AstroTurf.
There was a lemonade stand selling lemonade at prices that actual people could afford, and one of the girls selling lemonade whispered something to her friend, who asked for Wesley’s name.
And he answered! He said it very softly and didn’t make eye contact, and Kate was about to repeat it for the girls when she felt Miles squeeze her forearm.
But the girls seemed satisfied by the answer; emotionally, they were at a stage that Wesley would reach in graduate school, and yet they didn’t seem to be bothered by this difference.
Perhaps, thought Kate hopefully, he was even a step up from the local pickings, three of which were feet away, spitting soda on each other that very moment.
From the little town they passed into the country, stopping at every single honor-system vegetable stand and, feeling obliged to get something, soon found themselves rich with corn and green beans and zucchini.
In fact, zucchini was in such abundance that there were tables of zucchini being given away for free, and so they also felt obliged to take those, lest they rot, or attract vermin, and soon found themselves in possession of more zucchini than they had ever been in possession of in their lives, one of those milestones a person passes without fanfare, but a milestone nonetheless.
At a farmers’ market, Miles had the inspiration to ask a honey vendor whether there were any swimming holes nearby, securing not only five jars of honey on the comb, but a hand-drawn map to a stream where more boys Wesley’s age jumped down from a rock and a group of girls took pictures on their phones, some of the boys, some of each other, but mostly of themselves.
There were no parents around. The rock was very high, and once in a while one of the boys would curse when he hit the bottom, but still they kept jumping.
Miles explained to Wesley and Olive that they were observing a ritual by which young women weeded out young men from the gene pool, a custom that they could observe but not take part in.
They changed in the car beneath their towels, and they went back to the water.
It was a good chance to wash Giuseppe, and they pretended they were playing with him, though the truth was no one cared; a young mother was doing the same with her baby, having removed its diaper while pretending to introduce it to the joys of water, of summer.
Dip! Dip! It was all so lovely. They swam back and forth and then lay out on a rock, Kate pressed her wet leg against Miles’s wet leg, and Miles took her hand, very aware suddenly of her bare shoulder, the loosened tress that rested on her collarbone, the smell of her, sunscreen, and river water, her breath redolent of almond, Irish Crème, and candied papaya purloined from the children.
For it had been nearly two weeks of shared hotels, and the night before, they’d been so tired—maybe, he whispered, they could slink off into the woods?
What could go wrong at a swimming hole without a lifeguard?
And he half-meant it, high on the day he was.