Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The Lay of the Land
With a map spread before him at the kitchen table, my father seemed a dream of the misty Alleghenies. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and appeared to me behind the smoke of his chant: Munger Hollow Kinney Hollow Skunk Hollow Salt Rising Road Promised Land Road Stony Lonesome Road Great Valley Little Valley Starvation Hill Bear Creek Wolf Creek Trapping Brook Hanging Bog Town of Kill Buck. He told me his favorite place in the Alleghenies was a trout stream with the Indian name of Ischua: he said he didn't know what the name meant in the Seneca language, but that if I listened carefully I could hear the water in "ISHooway." I tried. And though I couldn't hear the water, I said I could. He smiled and told me about the glaciers that had gouged the hollows and valleys, about the wolves that must have denned near Wolf Creek, and about the lives of pioneers, the Mungers and Kinneys, whose names survive on maps but no longer on their weathered gravestones. He punctuated his excitement with drags of smoke and gulps of beer -- and like a toddler learning to speak, longing to please, I searched in stumbling whispers: "ISH-oo-way, ISH-oo-way." I tried speed: "ISHooway ISHooway ISHooway -- "
"You like that name? You can hear the water?"
I wasn't sure yet. I nodded.
He nodded and grinned and said, "Mark, go get me another beer; would ya?"
I fetched a brown bottle from the cardboard case on the porch -- he liked his beer warm -- and when I reentered the kitchen I could hear that in the living room Walter Cronkite had signed off and the shows had started. Yet my father was still sitting at the table in a cloud of smoke, studying a map and ready to talk some more.
Normally when he returned home from the power plant -- still hearing the high deafening whine of turbines and the pounding rattle of coal dropping through chutes -- all he wanted to do was eat supper, loll in his easy chair, smoke and drink, and fall asleep while the television blared. And yet when I handed him the bottle of Genesee and began to turn away, eager to join my mother and sisters in front of the television, he quickly motioned me back into a chair at the table to hear more mapped tales. I dutifully sat, and listened.
A few days later at supper, he announced that he planned to stop working so much overtime at the plant. Also that he had all but decided to buy some land on the Allegheny Plateau where the glaciated hills knuckled across the Pennsylvania border into the high dairy country of southwestern New York: "Land with a good spring so we can have clean drinking water and a trout pond. A place where we can build a little cabin. Where we can all spend summer weekends and where Mark and me can stay in deer season."
He had often talked about buying land in those rugged hills south of our home near Buffalo, but this time he spoke with more longing than usual, and I can still see his hands motioning as he seemed to plead, nails black with grease and coal, his wrists scabbed and scarred from the molten metal of welding, uncharacteristically punctuating his speech as he groped for the words that might help us to see his dream. For a few moments after falling quiet, he continued awkwardly gesturing.
Kim asked if the bugs would be bad in the woods. April asked if there would be bears. And I asked how good the television reception would be so far from Buffalo. Mom stood up and began clearing the table, the silverware and dishes clattering louder than usual. Looking down at his plate as if ashamed, he added quietly, "It's been a dream of mine."
A map can show you where you've been and where you intend to go, but not if you'll get there or what will happen if you do: it tells a story in the past tense. That evening when my father was possessed by a map at the kitchen table, he could see the routes from wilderness to settlement, could trace the stories of the cougar and bear and wolf and beaver and elk and the great forest and the legends of the thirsty men who felled trees, slew beasts, broke soil. He could see the routes he himself had traced to steep hillsides where he had searched for a gushing spring that would quench his coal-dusty thirst. In the place names, he might have seen the claims that people make on the land; and in the symbols for cemeteries, the claims that the land makes on people. But on his map, he could not yet dream the end of his own story.
That the land would dream.
