Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance. Now that he’d driven her away, he keenly wanted her again, but he had a dim recollection, from the stories he’d heard and read about men in his position, that this was the terrible thing about them: that it was known as stringing a girl along. He sat for a while in the changeless purple-toned streetlight, listening to the trucks on the interstate.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m still trying to figure out how to live.”

“That’s OK. You can have some time.”

He nodded, taking note of the word some .

“Can I ask you one question, though?” she said.

“You can ask me a million questions.”

“Well, just one for now. Do you think you might love me?”

He smiled. “Yes, I definitely think that.”

“That’s all I need, then.” And she started the engine.

Somewhere above the fog, the sky was turning blue. Lalitha took the back roads out of Beckley at highly illegal speeds, and Walter was happy to gaze out the window and not think about what was happening to him, just inhabit the free fall. That the Appalachian hardwood forest was among the world’s most biodiverse temperate ecosystems, home to a variety of tree species and orchids and freshwater invertebrates whose bounty the high plains and sandy coasts could only envy, wasn’t readily apparent from the roads they were traveling. The land here had betrayed itself, its gnarly topography and wealth of extractable resources discouraging the egalitarianism of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, fostering instead the concentration of surface and mineral rights in the hands of the out-of-state wealthy, and consigning the poor natives and imported workers to the margins: to logging, to working in the mines, to scraping out pre- and then, later, post-industrial existences on scraps of leftover land which, stirred by the same urge to couple as had now gripped Walter and Lalitha, they’d overfilled with tightly spaced generations of too-large families. West Virginia was the nation’s own banana republic, its Congo, its Guyana, its Honduras. The roads were reasonably picturesque in summer, but now, with the leaves still down, you could see all the scabby rock-littered pastures, the spindly canopies of young second growth, the gouged hillsides and mining-damaged streams, the spavined barns and paintless houses, the trailer homes hip-deep in plastic and metallic trash, the torn-up dirt tracks leading nowhere.

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. We’re securing unfragmented habitat for as many as two thousand breeding pairs of cerulean warbler.”

Zorn lowered her dull eyes to the muddy ground. “Right. Your species of interest. It’s very pretty.”

“Why don’t we all go somewhere else,” Lalitha said cheerfully, “and sit down and talk about the bigger picture. We’re on your side, you know.”

“No,” Zorn said. “I’m going to stay here for a while. I asked my friend from the Gazette to come up and have a look.”

“Have you been talking to the New York Times , too?” it occurred to Walter to ask.

“Yes. They seemed pretty interested, actually. MTR’s a magic term these days. That’s what you’re doing up there, isn’t it?”

“We’re having a press conference on Monday,” he said. “I’m going to lay out the whole plan. I think, when you hear the details, you’re going to be very excited. We can get you a plane ticket if you want to join us. I’d love to have you there. You and I could even have a little public dialogue, if you want to voice your concerns.”