This morning I woke to the sound of large machinery. I was surprised: it had started snowing last night and a full-on blizzard was expected. I got up and looked out the window: there was an excavator trying to turn around on my driveway. The snow was melting, too, which surprised me, and there were patches of ground visible. On the other side of my cabin I saw two more construction machines. I got dressed and went outside. There was a construction crew on my property, working just uphill from my house. Down below I could see their handiwork: a newly graded, well-laid road, forty feet wide, running through the forest. It ran within twenty feet of my cabin, right through my garden, obliterating it. The men were continuing their work, felling and stripping trees while a bulldozer pushed out the stumps. The road was continuing up the mountain.
I saw someone walking by and told him, “I want to speak with the person in charge of this project.” He said “Sure,” and then walked me down to the paved road, off my property, where there was a kind of restaurant. Just inside the door, at the bar, a man was speaking with two women, who were obviously distraught landowners: they had property maps in their hands, and he was showing them the route. The worker I was with explained to him that I wanted to speak with him, and he excused himself to the ladies and stepped outside with me. I explained what I had seen to him. He seemed very upset upon hearing that my garden had been destroyed, but in a slightly patronizing way: he felt sorry for my pettiness, and seemed to feel he could get rid of me easily enough. I asked him what was happening. “We’re building a new power line,” he said. “A new route across the mountain. People have been upset about all the power outages and the fragility of the system, and this route will connect several areas which at present have only one branch and are very vulnerable.”
“This is kind of ironic,” I said with the intellectual detachment I reserve for very large disappointments. “I live without electricity. I live very simply in general. I chose my property because it was so remote and removed from such things. If I had known it had a right of way cutting through it I never would have bought it.” He pretended to be upset that I hadn’t been informed and brought me to his office. He picked up a phone and began dialing, very slowly, on a rotary phone. He was just putting on a show of concern. The project was going forward. I might be able to get back the cost of my lily bulbs which had been dug up by the road. But that was about it.
As I waited I saw a strange hole on my left arm, about a quarter-inch in diameter. The blood at its bottom was dry, but the skin had not closed: a crisp round hole, about an eighth of an inch deep, remained in the skin, much like an old tap-hole on the outer bark of a tree. Looking more closely I saw more of them all over my arms, and my skin looked wrinkly, and I noticed I was losing flesh from my bones – I was too skinny. Something was wrong.
Then I woke up, and saw the snow piled up against my window.
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