I really didn't want to. I missed Sam and she missed me and when I talked to her on the phone from the A-frame in New Hampshire she let me know it, and anyway I figured it was time to be heading home. But I really didn't want to. Except for Sam, I've been asking myself what the hell I've got to go back to? A little cabin wouldn't be worth $30,000 on the market; an old truck; a family I don't even want to talk to. What's to stay there for? Now I'm back, I still feel that way, like there's no point to this.

Sam drug me over to Amos Pepperell's farm so I could see what the fuss was about. I've been there before. There's not much to it. He's got a house been there since God was a boy that's too big for him now he lives alone and he only bothers to open the kitchen, the living room, and one of the bedrooms. Come winter he closes off the bedroom so he doesn't have to heat it and sleeps on the couch in the living room next to the wood stove. He's got an electric pump in his well and plumbing and all that but the house is so old that next to the sink there's the original pump, the kind with a handle you have to push up and down until water comes out the spout. Still works, too. Damndest thing to have that handle on one side and a faucet on the other. I asked him why he didn't take it out. He said, "You never know." That's Amos. Them old guys, maybe it was living through the Depression but they're always prepared for anything. If Judgment Day came tomorrow, Amos would say, "Told ya," and you'd see that last night he'd laid out his blue suit to be taken up to Heaven in.

He took us down the slope to the river to show us where the road was going to go and I could see where it must of made sense to the engineers. The river bends out in a giant upside-down U to go around Bear Mountain, a bend that the road has to follow. The plans had them crossing the river back where it was narrow and then up ahead when it narrowed again so running it across Amos' slope would cut maybe ten miles off the trip like it was now, and straighten out that whole run.

Trouble was, like Sam said, it's a north slope and the sun doesn't get to it much in the winter so the snow and ice build up and take a long time to thaw come spring. Take all those trees out of there and all that water would just run off into the river, which could cause all kinds of problems downstream, but that wasn't what was worrying Sam.

"There's a major aquifer under here," she said, stomping her foot. "All that shit roads bring with them--specially road salt--will sink into the ground and wind up in the aquifer. People would be drinking poison."

To be honest, I thought she was going overboard there some. It didn't seem to me like this little patch could do all that. Of course, it wasn't just Amos' farm--they were going to do the same thing along a 20-mile stretch. Still, there's highways all over the place, have been for years so they must know how to deal with this since I ain't never heard of nobody dying from road salt in their water, and anyway the traffic ain't that heavy around here. It wasn't like we were down south of Augusta where they get commuters to Portland and Boston and lots of trucks and have traffic jams.

"We will," Sam said. "That's what this is about, dingo. They want the road so they can bring in more people. It's called urban sprawl. Remember when Augusta was this sleepy little city and Portland was the biggest thing around? Well, it's been creeping up the coast for twenty years and now Portland is just a suburb of Boston and Augusta's a suburb of Portland and pretty soon we'll be in the middle of a thousand-mile-long city. There'll be housing developments popping up all over the place and strip malls and before you know it, traffic jams every weekend instead of just in the summer. You wanna live like that?"

So that's what this was all about for her. She wasn't so worried about the water as she was about having to live next door to a Wal-Mart in five or ten years. As a matter of fact, I didn't blame her. As a matter of fact, no, I didn't want to live like that. Wilbur's already too big for me but I got a different solution.

"We could move," I said that night.

"What d'you mean, move?"

"I mean go away. Up north where you can still breathe. Canada maybe."

"Canada?" She looked like I'd said we ought to move to the moon. "What'd we wanna go to Canada for?"

"Get away from all this...urban sprawl you're talking about."

She got herself planted and I got ready for a blow. "You think we should run away."

"No, we could walk--" She scowled. I always know I'm in trouble with her when I can't make her laugh. "Look, there's nothing so wicked weird about it. People do it all the time--"

"Yeah," she said, "that's how the sprawl happens. It gets too crowded where they're at so they spread out. They eat up land, they eat up resources, and then they move on to the next patch and do the same thing. That's how cancer works, too." She leaned in. "I live here, I've lived here all my life. I like it the way it is. Right now the town can control how fast it grows. Once this road comes through and brings all these new people up here, it will lose control and in ten years my home will be gone. Evereything I know will be gone. Land values will go up and most of us who live here now won't be able to pay the taxes on our own damn places and we'll have to sell them and move somewhere's else because the new folks will be offering more than we can afford to refuse. Get it? I don't wanna be kicked out of my own home. It's happening all over but I'm not gonna let it happen here. I'm not moving."

And that, like they say, was that.