Excerpt

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 7:27 AM                    THE MARCH OF TIMES

Harley Snitz watched Nick Neidrich sidestep people and furniture on his resolute approach and yearned for the days when he moved with such easy agility. When the trooper entered, Snitz got straight to business. “Good news. Ms. Eboli can meet with us at 9:00; she said she’d give us a half-hour.”

Neidrich checked his watch. “We’ve got time. Let’s take a ride so I can get the lay of the land.”

The Chief leapt up and snagged his hat in one motion. “I know just the place.”

Neidrich drove as Snitz directed him into the Southern Mountains—foothills to the trooper, who was raised on the Allegheny Plateau. Tooling along back roads, he handled curves with an ease that was too casual for the Chief, whose face drew into the rictus of a man pretending to enjoy his first roller coaster ride; his hands gripped the seat, and he leg-pressed an imaginary brake on the floorboard. A glance at Snitz and Neidrich got the message. He eased up on the gas, and a simultaneous sigh of relief came from the passenger seat as they continued at a casual pace along the winding, weathered blacktop.

With the exception of the Culver Pond area, the ridge was undeveloped. Dense woodlands abruptly began with the rise in elevation and ran the southern spine of the valley. On both sides of the road, trees pushed close to the edge, their lush branches interlaced in prayer for eternal summer.

Snitz pointed to a gravel road leading to a ranger observation tower at the highest point on the ridge. After negotiating sharp bends and axle-busting potholes, Neidrich parked on a stretch of crushed brush and packed clay at the base of the tower.

Climbing the steep flights, between puffs for air, the Chief said, “I come here when I want to think. You can see for miles, put things in perspective.”

When he reached the top platform, Neidrich craned his neck in all directions. To the west, steam clouds rose from the cooling towers at Three Mile Island, hidden over the horizon. To the north, Freedom City and its suburbs spread like a coffee stain on the lovely pastoral canvas. The trooper’s gaze, like that of most who climbed the tower, settled on the south and east, into Essex County, the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch land. Harvesters moved in lazy silence, shaving wavy ribbons of tan and gold across rolling farmland that basked in warm sunlight and morning dew, earth tones replacing green, with autumn coming on. Silos, barns, and farmhouses, simple yet immaculate structures, dotted the landscape. It was a timeless scene. Had he been able to view the Amish country beyond, Neidrich could have erased almost all vestiges of modern life.

Where dirt roads once blended into the surroundings, two charcoal macadam lightning bolts wrenched treacherously along property lines on a meandering yet inevitable path toward market in Lancaster. Neidrich’s mind jerked away from his lush imagining of an enchanted past to a stark realization of modern life—those roads brought a threat more jolting than their black intrusion on the bucolic scene; farmers’ lifelines, they were also harbingers of the end of a way of life. Farther to the south than his eyes could reach, suburbs pushed ever closer and someday soon would be in view. Families, who had tilled the land for decades, now tired of their backbreaking work to eke out a living, one by one succumbed to the financial temptations of the developers. Soon, the valley would no longer be beholden to the sun and the rain but to the dollar.

Winds of change already were blowing from east and west, carried along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, hidden below the wooded slope to the south. Vagabond professionals, seeking the pot of gold and a safe, peaceful place to raise their children came to the end of the rainbow, only to commute to work in cities thirty, forty, fifty miles away. At the same time, the idyllic land they had discovered was consumed by their very presence, the fields giving way, not to neighborhoods where folks live and commune, but rather to those pods of civilization known as developments, tracts where people exist as friendly strangers. And rootless progeny of absentee parents supplanted the corn, children who, in their unconscious search for meaning in the vacuum, find only pastimes. Without the land to bind them, without the family to guide them, some drift toward destinies no one wants.

But then, Neidrich thought, two hundred years ago one of the true natives of the land may have stood as he now stood—perhaps on the same ridge—watching dirt roads deliver wagons full of settlers, seeing the forests disappear, pondering the end of a way of life. What would some descendent standing on the same spot two hundred years from now reflect upon and look forward to?

Neidrich stared, mesmerized, as Snitz’s voice broke his trance. “Nick? Are you OK?”

“Just thinking about something Randori and I were talking about.”

The Chief shivered as a chill breeze brushed the back of his neck. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a shadow spreading over the valley. “I think we’re in for some bad weather.”

Neidrich nodded. “Looks that way.”