Modified Friday Night Wars

Last night was quieter than it should have been for a Friday. When that happens, the weekenders tend to say it’s because the wind’s blowing away from the speedway. They tend to say it with a shake of their heads, a bit mournful; the sort of gesture that, in a local, might go with an anecdote about a hard-drinking neighbor who got popped on a DUI and will be riding a bike to the store for six months.

We’re not fully up on the history of the racetrack and the battles with the weekenders. We know they don’t like the track; they don’t like the traffic of big pickup trucks pulling trailers with gaudy decals up 209 before the turnoff at the roller rink outside of Accord, and they certainly don’t like the buzz of high-revving Modifieds on the dirt track, starting about five and ending around 10 or so. They came up from the city after a hard week, through the traffic, and now they want to sit on their patios and screen porches off their restored stone farmhouses and their Eyebrow Colonials and drink Pinot and, after a while, bring out the new tomatoes with the basil from the small garden that Ryan maintains for them down the hill a bit, where the green plastic deer-repellent netting doesn’t stand out too garishly. They want to hear the doves coo, and maybe an owl, and the drone of bees, and the murmur of the voices of their friends talking about real estate and restoration and the best place to get grass-fed beef or, if they’re vegetarians, organic squash or rhubarb. There was a lawsuit, and some pretty hefty legal forces came up from the City, but the racing still runs every Wednesday and Friday.

The Accord Speedway runs Modifieds, mainly. In the ’30s and ‘40s, these were chopped and channeled, stroked and bored versions of whatever you could get your hands on. If you built AMF or Revell car kits in the ‘60s, you were putting the decals on Modifieds. By now, there’s usually no original vehicle from which the racer is modified—they’re built from scratch, or hybridized from multiple cars, but you’d never be able to see the ’32 Ford or the 48 Merc underneath. Dirt Modifieds don’t really have much use for a body beyond channeling the airflow—except, that is, to provide cover for the ads—for DC Landscape Services or Rhinebeck Ford.

Accord is a dirt track; technically, it’s a quarter-mile clay speedway. If you go, you’re going to get dirty. On dry days, your hair turns grey-brown and your face feels gritty. On wet days, like last Wednesday, the midweek smaller machines throw clods of mud into the stands. There’s beer.

What there aren’t, though, are mufflers. Warmups start around 4:30 and the gates open at 5, and the noise bounces and channels between the ‘Gunks and the Catskills. For weekenders who bought in High Falls and Stone Ridge, it’s like having a mosquito about five feet from you. In Accord, where a pilgrimage from Park Slope and Brooklyn and Manhattan started buying up the old places and letting it be known what a bargain they’d gotten, that mosquito is pretty close to your ear. Real estate agents sold in Accord on Saturdays and Sundays, and for some reason the owner was always unavailable to show on Friday evenings.

Fridays are bad days to schedule the races—bad for the weekenders. It’s hard to show off your place to your guests without one of them asking, in an impolitic way that just might be a little spiteful, what that noise is. That’s when you shake your head in that way, if the wind’s blowing away from the speedway. If it’s not, your evening’s pretty much ruined.

For the locals, Friday night is the very best night for it. They’ve been servicing the weekender places all week, in a rising crescendo as Friday nears, for everything must be done and cleaned up by Friday evening. The cement mixer can stay if it’s a midcentury one, but the Volvo panel truck with your name on the side has to go, even if it’s full of tools and fragments of the fabrication you’re doing of a 1680 stone hearth, all laid out in a sequence that will go galley-west at the first pothole.

Saturday can start late. Saturday is Estimate Day, and it’s Time-and-a-Half Emergency Day. On Friday, you’re done by 5; you can cheer yourself hoarse, stand around a monster engine that your buddy paid for with a second mortgage, and pretty much it’s just you guys, whole families piled into the big diesel pickup, with a smattering of hardcore race fans coming in, sometimes on Harleys, sometimes in nice machines of their own, and in the stands there’s a few semi-locals who know someone who’s racing or just like the noise and the excitement. I’m not sure, but I might have seen betting.

Friday night, in other words, is the night when the locals and the weekenders set up as surreptitious armed camps. The weekenders have the money. They have the Pinot. They have the Wall Street bonuses paying for their wellhouse restoration. The locals have the Modifieds.

On the Accord Speedway web site, I read the disappointing news: Tonight’s Racing Has Been Cancelled Due To Weather &Track Conditions. But there’s next Friday, and the wild little runts on Wednesday. And on July 1, there’s going to be fireworks, and the Chicken Barbeque.

Traveling 1961

My first cross-country trip by car was in a 1961 Ford Falcon station wagon, with fake wood trim on the sides and a 3-speed on the column. My father had just bought the car and we were going to Los Angeles to reconcile with my grandfather after decades of gritted-teeth phone conversations on birthdays and Christmas. At the time neither I nor my sisters understood the cause of this long, long rupture. We didn’t know about The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, nor of my grandfather’s ambitions within the Church, and the crippling blow to those aspirations that my father’s refusal of the faith had brought. Only much later did I hear the story of my grandfather’s own betrayal; Pa was 88, Ma 87 and near death and hardly able to speak from a succession of small strokes, when they sat in the living room of the house in Morgantown, West Virginia, his voice shaking, silent tears running down her face, while I listened, and every part of my own history was transformed.

We left sometime early in the summer of 1961; I was 11. We had a checkerboard Thermos picnic box we’d redeemed some three books of S&H Green Stamps to get. We had a Leica IIIc with a foldout 50mm lens. Marty had a sun hat with cutouts of bananas and apples and the words Luscious Fruit appliqued to the brim. I was wearing corrective shoes. Su was the oldest and the most responsible. She had read up on some of the places we were going on the way from Long Hill Road, Guilford, Connecticut, to 1317 Clubview Drive, Los Angeles, California.

The interstate system had been a matter of law for five years, but we didn’t see any of it, unless you count the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which by then may have been designated I-76, though no one called it that.

It was on the Turnpike somewhere around Bedford that my father realized the 90 horsepower straight 6 was underpowered. We didn’t have air conditioning; the only accessories were the heater and the AM radio. Going uphill in the Alleghenies Pa would downshift to second and power—barely—past the big rigs lumbering up at 25 or 30; on the way back down, they’d go past at 75 or 80, trying to get their momentum for the next hill attack. The road was full of swooping curves which opened up to great green vistas, and tunnels that were dark and noisy, with the windows open and the headlights on and the trucks lumbering on one side or rushing past on the other. For children embarking on a great adventure, rural kids who raced our bicycles up and down the roads between the chicken coops and the truck farms, the mountains were thrilling. Soon, however, we sank into the back seat; Pa’s hands were clenched and white on the steering wheel. Up Sideling Hill, he watched the engine temperature rising steadily. It was the first new car he’d bought since before the war.

That first day was a very long one: from Guilford to Morgantown, West Virginia, where Will and Molly had offered us a place to stay. We left very early, but hit New York traffic at the edge of the Connecticut Turnpike, and sat impatiently on the Cross Bronx Expressway. The Esso maps were on Ma’s lap; any talk between the back seat and the front was desultory and often interrupted as driver and navigator tried to find the next turn or landmark. We exited the Pennsylvania Turnpike at New Stanton in the dusk; it wasn’t the shortest way, but by then Will’s directions from the Somerset exit, which involved the New Centerville Road and then the Kingwood into Confluence, then following the signs to Markleysburg and Bruceton Mills looked unlikely. By the time we got to Will and Molly’s house, it had been full dark for more than an hour, and Pa’s hands were shaking and he could hardly get out of the car with his legs cramping up.

It is difficult today to imagine the experience of that 500 mile trip, its terror and its immediacy and the intimacy of every moment, when there was nothing to distract or to insulate: hot air blowing in from the little side-vent windows turned all the way out; the high blat of the engine braking on a runaway semi going down Sideling Hill; the crinkle of wax paper as the sandwiches were unwrapped; the smell of hot tomato soup in a thermos kept in a checkerboard vinyl picnic bag; the rise and fall of the temperature gauge; the changing voices of two adults embarking on a difficult and ultimately futile journey.

But I remember things with hallucinatory clarity: not just the brilliant white of Marty’s Luscious Fruit hat or the struggles to allocate the bench seat among the three children; more lucidly, the rhythmic swoop of the cables on the George Washington Bridge; the approaches to the oases on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, with their stone buildings and the lines of cars at the gas pumps, and the smell of gasoline, so sweet it was a temptation to drink it; the warm light of early evening as we paid the toll and were, for a short while, granted something like solace.

Metes and Bounds

Back where the hayfield ends and the dense greenery around the creek grows-- skunk cabbage and scrub and saplings-- the neon orange ribbons tied around trees or stakes struck in the ground are fading to a dull autumnal hue. Some of them have decayed into scraps, now attached to the tree only by the new bark that has grown up around them. Others are entirely gone.

Once you could walk down through the darkest part, where the creek used to cut before the big oak came down and, for a long winter, collected branches and wet leaves and the occasional cardboard box or plywood scrap, and by spring had redirected the flood into a new channel. If you concentrated, if you knew what you were looking for, you could find a point where the orange flashes lined up to set the boundary between our land and the Feather Farm.
It wasn't till the second fall, after the winds down from the ridge had stripped the trees and the first light snow lay on the ground, that we discovered the remnants of the stone wall above which marched that irregularly spaced row of ribbons.

In the old parts of America, the land is divided and possession defined by a system known as metes and bounds. This wall once marked a mete-- a straight line, set if not by surveyor at least by some systematic agreement between landholders, and demarcated by the authority of a stone wall. Back then, the wall served other purposes as well. Its construction provided a place for the stones taken from the tilled fields, the ones that weren't regular enough to serve in the construction of stone houses and outbuildings. The stone wall set the line where the tilled land ended and the woodlot began. Over two and a half centuries, successive generations of farmers on this land yielded up some of the fields to the trees, for if the soil is too wet or the granite substratum comes too close, it's a more valuable use of land to let it go to woods, for woods provide fuel and even, if one is lucky enough, and patient enough, a stand of sugar maples that will offer a cash crop.

The shift in function was rarely as planned as it might seem. Among other things, even a woodlot might require thirty years or more to develop a sustainable yield, especially if the choice is oak. Sugar maples may take a half-century to fully mature. But backing away from a boundary line generally encouraged irregular growth, and the line between the hayfield and the woodlot today is thirty feet or more from the tumbled-down stone wall, a series of peninsulas and bays in the ocean of grass that is rising today, a month before the first cutting.

The other three sides of the farm are defined by bounds-- by a verbal description of the landmarks that set the corners or the reaches. Two of them are roads that date back before American independence-- one, Rest Plaus, is an artifact of the era when the Dutch had settled here; the other, Old King's Highway, dates to the time when the British colony of New York had its capitol in Kingston. It was the principal road between the city of New York and the King's Town.

Down at the end of the farm, there's a county bridge over the Kripplebush Creek, and beyond that, a triangle of land defined on one side by the creek and on the other by another stone wall and, along that wall, a long row of tall trees, some of them very old, that stretches back to the far corner, where the woodlot and the creek meet. The tree that came down and redirected the flood stream two years ago was a victim of the meandering of the creek, which had moved away from the woodlot, and was now eating up the soil that rooted that march of old trees. In places, the old stone wall has been breached, and in the flood of spring, it floods deep into Harry's hayfield. If you stand on the bridge, leaning over the utilitarian steel guardrail, the land between creek and treestand makes little sense. It's only when you walk further, past the creek, that you can see how the water flow once cut more clearly, rendering the bound that gave this now-orphaned piece of land to our small farm and not to Harry's.

The county's decision to replace the old bridge with a new one a few decades ago is a legendary anecdote, often repeated. Only some of the villains and dupes change names, depending on the teller. Up the hill, two excavators have their houses, and they tend to drive their big diesel dumptrucks to and from the house most days. Wayne even drives his back home for lunch-- every day, at noon. Over decades, the weight of those heavy trucks, and the general shift of the creek closer to the house, weakened the original bridge. It helped that one of the excavators was working for the county department of roads at the time; it helped that the other came from a family dating well into the 19th century or before, and had the weight of authority that comes with that, around here. It also helped that the town had decided it was a good idea to have a second means of getting the school buses to and from the school a few miles further, off 209, in case of a washout where the river crosses the highway. County engineers designed a new bridge, to specs more fitting to an interstate, with guardrails and wide concrete abutments, all to cross a creek perhaps 15 feet in width: a dwarf dressed in a dinner jacket, smoking a Cuban cigar.

When they built the bridge, though, the cement forms went in at the wrong angle; just who did the misreading is one of the variations in the telling of the story. The result was a bridge that requires a quick turn to enter, and another to leave. Shortly after the bridge was completed, one of the excavators took the second turn a little too fast, and dropped the backhoe he was trailing behind the dump truck, onto what was then the front porch of the house. Now that porch is gone, and the old line of the original house is revealed, with its stone corner and its eyebrow windows; only the concrete pad is left, disintegrating as the water seepage leaves cracks, and weeds grow in the cracks and push it aside.

The bridge rendered permanent what had, over centuries, been fluid, though at a pace only visible to those whose sense of time was marked by the growth, from sapling to full grown, of a sugar maple or an oak.

When things like this happen, a land sale requires a new survey, and that survey is a result not just of bringing the crew with transit, theodolite, compass and chain, but of research in the old records at the town hall or even the historical society. It's a delicate matter, especially when the property abuts an old family.

The land changes, the landscape, too; whole stands of trees may be cut for wood, or a low treeline may over generations rise tall enough to hide the surrounding countryside. A hayfield became a cornfield in the '30s and '40s, when tractors replaced horses and when the big dairy farms out in the Midwest made the small dairy farms obsolete. The metes and bounds may change as well-- the bridge, which has now moved some thirty feet from where Old King's Highway once crossed Kripplebush Creek, the far end of the creek which now swerves and has turned an island into a peninsula. But the legal limits cannot adapt as the land adapts. Medenbach and Eggers, Surveyors, hammered steel stakes, some of them five and six feet long, into the ground, and hung the neon orange ribbon from those stakes. The stakes may last a century, or they may soon be buried under dirt or fallen trees or the shifted hurry of the stream. Surveys aren't cheap in the land of metes and bounds.

Out in western Michigan, the big production dairy farms of the '40s and '50s that doomed the farms around here are themselves giving way, as the factory farms in California and other production agriculture states have shrunk what was once an economy of scale down into a losing proposition. In Eaton Township, the town of Vermontville houses the Village of Vermontville, where East and West Main Streets intersect North and South Main Streets. The Village is unusual for the area, established as Union Colony, a religious community transplanted from East Poultney, Vermont, whose stony land, never a paradise, was by 1835 largely exhausted.

The Village may have been named in memory of an older site, but its boundaries bore no relation to the metes and bounds of East Poultney. The Village itself was exactly a square mile in area; its limits had been defined at a great distance, as part of the reorganization of what was then the Great West into a rigid grid, each square or section one mile by one mile. By the time Vermontville was legally incorporated, in 1867, in a mass incorporation frenzy that saw the Michigan legislature defining hundreds of otherwise informally organized communities, the Homestead Act had been in place for more than five years, granting 160-acre quarter-sections free to those who laid claim, improved the property, and lived continuously upon it for five years. Residents of the original Colony sprawled outward in neatly defined boxes of land: Church's Addition and Squier's Addition in 1869, and then Davis and Parmenter's Additions in 1877.

Go east on Main Street today, it it will turn into Vermontville Highway. Soon thereafter, it will veer southward on a diagonal for a half mile or so, and then reorient itself onto the grid, marching eastward, as relentless as the metal edge on a child's school ruler, till it ends abruptly, just south of Lansing. Along that twenty mile stretch, it gives no acknowledgment of the changes in topography: of the point at which the flatlands, still marked out in geometric subsets of those original quarter-sections, criss-crossed by other roads at exactly one-mile intervals, give way to broken terrain carved by the Brumm River.

Just to the east of the Brumm River bridge, the Vermontville Highway intersects Bradley Road, and the farmer there on the southeast corner has had to adapt his fields to the wet and fertile realities of bottomland, where a river has been meandering, flooding and receding, dumping new soil or taking it away, for many centuries. There's a retention pond, reeking with effluent from the livestock factory, and many of the fields are farmed in narrow strips.

Bradley Road stops its northward thrust at the Vermontville Highway. The road once was to have continued north by a section or two, but sometime in the last two centuries, the clear separation of the land into its orderly quarter-sections had failed its occupants, and the road, unused and unnecessary, was abandoned. In its place is an equally strict demarcation of ours from theirs: a windbreak of tall trees, beneath which there was once a stone wall.

Or, at least, the plan for one. Land in that part of Michigan was never as rocky as was Vermont, or the middle of New York, where Old King's Highway intersects Rest Plaus Road. The land was mainly flat, windswept, and a line of trees was more imperative.

The Land Ordinance of 1785, which demarcated the Great Western Lands in their neat mile-square sections, was a brilliant way to encourage development; one could purchase public land from a thousand miles away, pack up and travel to it, settle into its rigorous parameters, sure of where it began and ended.

All over Michigan, though, the rigid grid of roads is losing its logic. As the state has teetered toward bankruptcy, as counties have lost their tax bases to more efficient agribusinesses elsewhere and more desperate and productive industrial workers far across the globe, the road crews are tearing up the pavement, leaving it to gravel or to fade into weeds. Driving at night, not quite sure where you are, you used to have the comfort of knowing you could head along that county road until eventually you came upon a village or town. Now you can find yourself in darkness, confronting an intersection that has no outlets, leaving you to turn around and head back where you came from. Perhaps the next intersection will allow you to turn left or right; perhaps you should turn one way or the other, but you are not sure which way is best. You have no metes and bounds to follow, no roads that hug the creek or the ridgeline, linking your journey to the journeys of generations moving from one clear place to another. You are caught within the dolorous geometry of a land without place.

Watching the Weather

When it's this hot in early June, it's good not to have the air conditioners in yet. This sort of heat won't last more than two or three days, and once you've emptied the wheelbarrow of all the early-spring junk you got out of the creek after it dropped-- corrugated roof pieces, lawn tractor tires, a shiny soccer ball that bounced up to the fallen tree and then was pushed back by the current into a perpetual circle that was perpetually fascinating to watch, the Dutch Boy paint can and the piece of what looked to be a Model T Ford chassis-- and wheeled it up to the barn, loaded the Maytag and the Frigidaire, backed it down the now-dry swatch between the house and the barn, taking extra care not to drop the Frigidaire off the top like you did last year, brought it up to the back door, unloaded each one and carried it to its requisite room, trying to remember where you put the plywood inserts that allow it to fit to the eccentric shapes of 18th century windows: well, by then it's probably 6pm and starting to cool off anyway. If you do get the units in, the front will blow through and you'll have weeks of cool weather again with those ugly metal boxes hanging out of the house.

It's not just the wasted effort. It's also the loss of something more ephemeral and more precious than comfort. When it's this hot, you smell yourself, even if you are taking three or four cold showers a day. But you also smell the first baking of the haygrass, the effulgent sweetness of those white flowering bushes that are scattered all through the scrub beside the creek, the goldenrod and the honeysuckle in the fallow field across the road. With the air conditioners in, you can't hear the arguments of irritated, combative redwing blackbirds or the hum of the hornets building their hives under the eaves of the barn, where you'll have to spray them out or swat them out in a week or two.

People don't go out as much in this heat. On a normal weekday, the road might get twenty or thirty cars a day, usually high school kids shortcutting past some accident up on 209, plus Wayne Bush's big dumptruck with the trailer, your alarm clock at 6am and your noon whistle when he comes back to the house for his lunch hour, plus a few lawn service trucks and sometimes the disconsolate panel truck from the plumber up from Wayne's whom everyone has learned can't be trusted. For stretches on a normal day, you might hear nothing of traffic except the faint hum of 209 up the hill. On these hot days, Wayne still goes out, but the cars tend to disappear from the soundscape.

Everything waits, though the pace of waiting is slow. For all the weather.com radar and the NOAA online commentaries don't tell you what you wouldn't have known fifty years ago, or a hundred, or two hundred and more, when the farmer first put up this shed by the King's highway up to Kingston, before the Revolution. The surveyor's stone under the dwarf apple that marks the original road, with the date-- 1760-- carved into it, is cool to the hand even in the hottest hours of this first hot spell.

The sky isn't really blue. It's so hot it's white, and the first hints of big cumulus clouds are hardly whiter, barely discernible in the blinding haze. By logic, the cold front could come in at any time of the day or night, but it doesn't. It comes late in the afternoon or early in the evening, or it waits till two in the morning. That's a consequence of locality that the internet weather predictors can't take into account: the fact that we are in a valley between mountain ranges, albeit low, well-worn ranges: the Catskills to our west, the Shawungunks-- the Gunks-- to our east. The front pushes eastward from Chicago, from Detroit, from Buffalo, and piles up on the westward wall of the Catskills, until the sun angles long and the air cools, but the land, hot, still, from the day's residue, pushes the front up over the peaks.

If the hot spell lasted more than two days, you have gotten in the habit even this early in summer of closing off the house by 8am, before you head out to the studio or the vegetable patch or the cooler spot by the creek where you hope to read, or the chicken coop or the shop by the barn.

Late in the afternoon, you start to time your move: back to the house to open it up for a spell, when the first cool rushes of the front come down off the mountains and sweep across the ridge and down the hayfield and through the house. Through the house, that is, if you've opened the windows, probably just the ones upstairs, where the black roof has burned the air and the thermostat reports it's 92. Downstairs, it's 80 or so; the house has a dirt crawlspace and a stone corner that brings the last of the winter cold up from the deep earth. Opening those upstairs windows is part of the handicapping game you play, you and the front: you want to push the cool air through the house, but get the windows shut again before the sheets of rain, close to horizontal, drive their way into the bedroom on the northwest side. Racing up the stairs, you trip on the dog, who is heading for the bathtub to cower for the next few hours, as the lightning strikes and the thunder cracks and the hail on the roof makes undulating waves of sound. Did you remember to put the dropcloth back over the plastic bins in the attic crawlspace, where the persistent leak has defied your forays with silicon caulk-gun onto the roof, filling in the crannies between the old shingling and the badly-laid metal flashing? Too late to consider that, now. You are watching as the low spot between the house and the barn grows shiny with wet and then, in a gushing moment, becomes a runoff creek.

Tomorrow it will be cold in the morning, and the runoff will have subsided into long puddles. The grass will seem like a matting that floats on a substratum of water and mud. The creek will have already begun to subside, showing you the new harvest of things from upstream: a cardboard box from Amazon.com, what's left of a screen door, two saplings still verdant and leafy, piles of sticks packed against the fallen tree in a deceptive replica of beaver dams.

The air conditioners are still in the barn. Next week, or the week after, will be time enough to make them your day's chore. Then it will be true summer, and there will be weeks when the roof radiates hot into the loft and the bedrooms get closed off into little cells of cool, while you wait for the break, covet the early morning, doze in the afternoon. This time, though, it's still too early. The body's memory of winter, the burn of frostbite and the stiffness of muscles in the cold mornings, the persistent, raking cough that took so long to subside, the sense that nothing was alive or would ever be alive again, not even you: this is the antidote.

The wind has come up. It's bending the trees, undulating the hayfield, but it's coming from the southeast. It's not time to watch the sky, close up the car, head for the house, turn on the radio. The mountains are still holding the weather at bay. You have some time yet.

Three Bad Winters: Real Estate Adventures

In the 1990s, California was booming. Booming too hard. I don't mean in retrospect, with that sage shake of the head that indicates saddened wisdom but is really schadenfreude. The dot.com bubble that burst around 2000 wasn't predictable; don't let anyone tell you so.

Except maybe the Wong brothers in San Francisco. I first met them in the late '70s, when I was living in the Haight and trying to write my doctoral dissertation. Every day I would eat my toast, drink my coffee, and sit at the electric typewriter, listening to the murmur of the belt passing over the pulley and looking at the small white notecards and the larger yellow ones on either side of my desk. Sometimes I'd notice after an hour or two that my fists were clenched in my lap, clenched until they were shaking from the intensity of their inactivity.

Around one, I'd go down the hill to the Wong's grocery to buy something to eat for lunch. At the time, I had a strong belief in magical thinking, and so I tended to buy small increments of foods I'd eaten when I was a happy if nervous, awkward child: Campbell's tomato soup and a can of tuna and a small jar of butter pickles; or a small piece of raw liver and an onion.

Though the Wong's store was small and dark, the meats were excellent and so was the fish. By the late '70s, the Haight was over its heroin and methamphetamine nadir and was beginning to come back a bit; the rents were still cheap but most of the apartments in the three-and four-flats had been fixed back up, the holes in the walls patched and the floors sanded and the trim repainted. Medical students from UCSF had moved back in, and Cole Valley next door was getting hip. The Wong's grocery had survived the bad times, probably in testament to the ironwilled, ferocious, terrifying presence of Mr. and Mrs. Wong, who rarely spoke and never smiled. Sometimes they followed me around the store, even long after I'd lived up the street and bought my lunch from them. I had moved from Austin, and I was still wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and t-shirts with the names of bands and venues on them.

The Wong brothers worked in the store after school. While I was still living there, or perhaps shortly after I moved to take a teaching job, one of them persuaded his parents to let him convert the back storage room into a wine area, and he began to study the subject.

His timing was good, and so was his brother's. By the '90s, the two of them were major forces in the Northern California epicurean craze. They knew the dot.com bubble was a bubble because their high-concept restaurant and their small-batch wine business were epicenters for feats of wilder and wilder excess. Just before the crash, you'd see high-end Range Rovers and Mercedes sedans parked on the sidewalk in front of their places-- $500 tickets prominently displayed under the windshield wipers. It was hard to find a parking spot around there by then-- a legal one, anyway.

The bubble down in Southern California was as big and as airy, but the hot air that filled it came from a different sort of furnace. Down there, it was the entertainment industry first-- the once-booming market for CDs was waning, but the new technology of the DVD was fueling a multimedia production boom. That, in turn, generated a spectacular housing run-up.

In San Francisco, in Silicon Valley and along the northern Coast Highway, the demand for housing resulted in laughable extremes, for there was little or no desirable land upon which to build new housing. Sure, there was Oakland, where Maxis Software's Will Wright had moved up the hills; but if you weren't a tycoon or a startup baby, you were pretty much forced further and further to the north and east, into the parched regions around Antioch, where the lots were cheaper. If you've seen the pictures of Altamont, you know what Antioch looks like. A town like Arbor, or a development like Discovery Bay, where every house had its own dock!: these were places reminiscent of the boom towns of Florida generations ago. On a good day, it only took you an hour and a half to get in to San Francisco. If you were working for Oracle Software in Redwood City, it was two hours-- if you went to work early, say at 4am, and stayed late-- ten-ish.

Topography limited the growth, there and in Southern California, too. Ocean, bay, mountains, desert: all of these conspired to push good houses from pricey to luxurious to unaffordable.

But you didn't necessarily have to be in Redwood City to work for Oracle; you didn't have to be in Universal City to work for Universal. By the late '90s, you could remote commute, and the people who benefited most from the new booms of the postindustrial American economy were ideally suited to this very different way of living and working. For one thing, their very industries were devoted to the hypersprawl of the cybernetic universe; there was a mindset there, and the technology to make that mindset not just hip and forward-looking, but efficient.

And then there were those whose lives had not kept pace with the information economy; the middle managers laid off and left without even a job category under which to search in the Los Angeles Times or the San Francisco Chronicle; there were those given early-retirement "incentives" who saw the future looming without need of them; there were all the others who had lived at the margins of these frothy booms and were ready to cash out.

Here was the plan. You had that house you'd bought in Pasadena or even Silver Lake or even that warehouse around Bunker Hill, where the down-at-heel commercial buildings were undergoing loft and condo conversions. You'd sell it for a million, or two: with capital gains taxes low-- and with a friendly accountant of dubious ethical standards to help you out-- you'd take that money and move where housing was cheap.

That was the logic that drove Las Vegas's housing bubble. And in this case, you didn't have to be prescient to see it wasn't an endless upward vector till the Millennium-- unless, that is, you believed the televangelist who declared the Rapture was due in, say 2008. In Vegas, the spectacular influx of construction workers and Best Buy sales managers and dish-network franchisees fed the housing boom, making it, for a time, self-conflagrating. Still, where else could you take your middle-manager 401-K and your house sale windfall and find a place that looked like it was bustling, a safe bet to park yourself and your cash?

You don't need me to tell you what happened to that class of outward-emigrating Californians, the ones who moved to Las Vegas, to Henderson, to Lake Havasu City.

But there was another class of people who took the money and ran from California. They were the actual software engineers, the actual IPO stockholders, the composers of movie music who were doing it all in software and phoning it in; the story developers and the rewrite people; but also the men and women who had sold their startups and were ready to start afresh. They headed north, and east: to Idaho, to Montana, to Utah and Colorado.

My sister lives in Spokane, Washington. If you're touristing in picturesque Seattle, bored with the Pike Market and through with your sojourn to Vancouver, and you've spent the requisite week in Olympia National Park getting your high-end hiking shoes moldy from the near-perpetual rain and fog, you might decide to head east to the icy mountain lakes around Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, or further. You'll come over the Cascade Range-- that's Mount Rainier on your right-- and down into the scablands. It's not pretty, and it's not entertaining, either, if you're not a geologist. But you'll get to Spokane in about four hours, assuming you are in a rental car with a cruise control and you are not concerned with gas mileage or the unlikely event you'll get a speeding ticket.

Spokane is a pretty town, with a university and a well-maintained system of parks along the river. Coeur d'Alene is just a half-hour further; from there, another two-and-a-half will get you to Missoula, Montana, where the Rockies loom above the espresso-and-gelato places around the University of Montana.

This is the stretch-- from Spokane to Bozeman, and up and down the range-- that took a huge swath of those California emigrants. Their influx didn't hyperinflate the construction industry in quite the same way as their less adventurous, less prosperous counterparts in Nevada and Utah. For one thing, there were fewer of them; for another, they were richer, and their taste turned toward neo-primitive: log cabins, albeit 7,000-square-foot ones, added to the 500 acres of ranchlands down below or, more commonly, thrust into the foothills and the mountains themselves. To get to those sites, they had to carve their own roads, or they used the old logging roads that were already there, in which case they only had to worry about the driveway, the mile or so that wound up to their spectacular location.

Towns and cities like Spokane, Missoula, and Bozeman didn't roll over for the immigrants the way Las Vegas did. In part this was because these places, like the California sites new residents were leaving, were hemmed in by topography, and by the looming presence of the U.S. Forestry Service, which owned much of the land surrounding these communities. There were Chamber-of-Commerce types who railed against the government intrusions in their free right to develop: local neighborhood groups; town and city zoning boards; nature conservancies; the Forestry Service. You could Sagebrush Rebellion those people into submission (coming to zoning variance meetings with four or five of your construction guys, all of you in jeans and boots and with guns strapped on-- that might not be fully legal, but it sure was effective); you couldn't laissez-faire the topography into an inviting desert flatness or the climate into a 12-month construction season.

If you remember Hitchcock's North By Northwest, what probably comes to mind is the wheatfield scene, with the Greyhound bus and the murderous cropdusting biplane, and Cary Grant running; or perhaps it's the archly erotic sleeper-car episode that's etched into your memory. But you may also remember the spectacular modernist house built into the hills around Mt. Rushmore, where the villainous Vandamm supervised his nefarious spy network. In the area I'm talking about, there were a lot of houses that looked at least a little like that one. Then there were the log manses, some of which simply clad the outer walls (where the floor-to-ceiling windows weren't, that is) in American Primitive half-timbering, in modernist revisions of Mary Colter's Western resort hotels for the railroads. These were houses built outside the zones of municipal regulation, often in small gobs of lands that had remained in private hands though surrounded by US Forest Service lands. Every local understood them to be follies-- up there where the winds would get them, up the steep grades that took the life out of even a good American 4x4, let alone an AWD Volvo station wagon or a Range Rover. But if you were from LA or San Francisco, the point was to live up on the hill. It gave you the view-- and it made you everyone else's view. If you didn't know the locals well enough to understand their sense of humor-- irony, really-- you could easily have understood their offhand comments to be compliments, expressions of respect, even envy.

These days, you can still see those houses, if you look for them. Some of them still have the lights that go on as the dusk settles, or when the security service sends the Jeep up to check on things. Those are the places where the emigrants had pockets deep enough to handle the bust. The rest are pretty much dark all the time. Some of them have already succumbed to their own folly and the cold neutrality of the place upon which they were so foolishly dropped. Their roofs have collapsed under the weight of the snow; the implacable blizzards pounding onto their cathedral windows have worried loose the weatherstripping and maybe even shattered the plate glass. The pipes have burst, or the pilot lights for the propane-converted Viking chef's stove went out and the house filled with gas until an freak blizzard lightning strike. Down in the valleys, where the locals know to live, close to the highway, sheltered from the sweeps of weather, people looked up as the house exploded like it was July the 4th in March.

Three bad winters. That's what my sister called the death spiral of those dreams of Westering by heading east.

Most of those houses took up a good deal more of that boondoggle California real estate capital than their builders had planned. It's one thing to sit with your architect in Brentwood or downtown San Francisco or Sausalito, and go over the figures. It's another to get the Moen faucets trucked up to the site; to get the road graveled and the well dug, and dug again, and again, until you find the nearest water is down at the bottom of the hill, and you need auxiliary pumps and underground piping to get it up to the house. There's the stubborn refusal of stone to blast the way you want it to. There's the miles of conduit because you didn't want unsightly poles and wires. There's the leach field, and the issue of the solar roofing material that was such good cocktail conversation a few months before. And there's the driveway. By that time, you're ready to pinch a little, especially when you get the estimate for the drainage system and the gravel loads and the blacktop. When the contractor sighs and says don't say he didn't warn you about penny-wise and pound foolish, you think you've won a small victory.

That first fall-- by which I mean the last week of August and the first two weeks of September-- the place was spectacular. The first winter, though, was a surprise: that's the way you described it to your screenwriter partners in LA, or your design team at Oracle once you got through on the conference call to Redwood City; once, that is, you'd found a way to reorient the satellite dish so you could make contact, or found a guy who'd come in from Coeur or Missoula to do it for you.

If you were smart, your contractor had put in a really really big fuel oil tank, and before you moved in, he'd had it filled to the top. Naturally he'd had it filled to the top, as he was getting his contractor's 30% surcharge on that, too. The fillup was in that last bill he gave you, the one that surprised you so, when you discovered that the fixes on your punch list weren't going to be free, or they weren't going to be done at all. That contractor was a local. His daddy was a rancher, and he was maybe a state legislator in his spare time. Moral outrage didn't do for much and God help you if you were stupid enough to take it to law or even mention it around at the Pickle Barrel or Joe's Parkway Market down in Bozeman.

You made it through the first bad winter ok. You had a long spell where you couldn't get the Range Rover anywhere near the house, so you left it down at the bottom and hiked back and forth-- not easy, you told your friends back where you came from, when it's 25 below and snowing, hard. This was good stuff to talk about; it made you feel you were learning things that would serve you well in your work, or in your dealings with your fellow workers in the knowledge industries.

The second winter was different. For one thing, you were unhappy with the surcharge the fuel oil company was levying to go up the logging road, and the surcharge on the surcharge for climbing up your hill to fill the tank. And you'd looked up the fuel oil prices elsewhere-- they were 20 or 30 % less than you were paying. So when the dispatcher called to tell you they had you scheduled for one more delivery in October, you checked the tank and decided you could hold off for a month or so. When you called in early December, anticipating a rush of Christmas visitors eager to experience the true Western life, it came as a rude surprise that they didn't deliver up in the mountains after the first week of November. You spent the winter with the thermostat set at 42 degrees, praying none of the pipes would burst, but of course they did, flooding out the billiard room when the January thaw came. You got the oil delivered that week, and the plumber came, too-- after you hired your contractor to bring in his road-grading equipment to cut a path through the snowpack. He didn't do it till you paid up that last bill, and paid him in advance for the road work.

By that time, you were pretty much tapped out. Back in LA or Pasadena, back in Santa Cruz or Sausalito, you solved those problems with a sweet little home equity loan against the hundreds of thousands you'd banked in appreciation over the last few years. This time, though, the local banks weren't so sanguine about the uptick prospects on your particular type of project.

The third bad winter may not have hit for three or four years. On the other hand, bad winters go in clusters out there. And for the inexperienced, most every Montana winter is a bad one.

By the third bad winter, the sign where the logging road cut off the main road was already disconsolate; the hanging plate with the name of the realtor, the one that hooked underneath the big sign: that was gone, and so was the one above it, the one with the arrow pointing toward the property. When the first hard snows came in October, the road was undisturbed; a silent white mantle lay over the space between the pines, which seemed darker, stronger, more cruel than ever before.

Welcome to the Town of Olive

Outside of Olive Bridge, New York, on 213 close to the Ashokan Reservoir, a sign says:

Welcome to the Town of Olive

Hawking, Peddling, and Soliciting Forbidden Without Permit

Building Permits Required

It’s worth unpacking each line, for every statement reveals something of the complexity of what probably seems to tourists (if any of them venture here), a pretty if slightly down-at-heel rural hamlet. They’d be more interested in the rambling barn-with-a-barn-connected-to-a-shed-with-a-barn-and-another-shed-not-to-mention-that-tractor-shelter down toward the bottom of the hill, or the gleaming little once-a-church Rebekah Lodge with the brand new standing-seam roof that hasn’t done much to attract buyers. The real estate agency is on its third sign, not just because the agent has changed, but because each winter weathers the plywood and each summer bleaches out the silkscreened logo for Better Homes and Gardens Realtors or Westwood Metes and Bounds or Mary Collins Realty. On 213, you see so many realtor’s signs that it’s hard to remember which one goes where.

The town boundary sign is a work of antiquity. The welcome isn’t from Olive Bridge (or, as the feds have it, Olivebridge, though everyone says they’re wrong). Olive is the town; Olive Bridge is the village or hamlet. The distinction dates back centuries; it was a means of sweeping rural outliers into a taxing body that’s responsible for roads, jails, and the like. You won’t actually find a town of Olive—just when you think you have, you’ll see the sign welcoming you to the village of Olive Bridge.

The first warning beneath takes you back to one dark period in Olive Bridge history: to 1903, when New York City made a preemptive strike at water rights in the Catskills, took over a huge swath of land, some of it by condemnation, some by acquisition from the state. Over a ten year period, the city engineers and workers built a massive infrastructure project, including a dam, causeways, spillways, and pumping stations. In 1913, the dam closed Esopus Creek flooding thousands of acres of farmland, and thousands more of forest, and sinking a string of villages and hamlets whose residents had been bought out in condemnation proceedings. Between 1912 and 1914, the Esopus had become one of the most beautiful alpine lakes in the United States, and one of the most despised. Land disputes continued for decades—the last was settled in 1940—and the deep mistrust of the big city by rural New Yorkers hardened to contempt.

While the reservoir was in the construction stages, though, the region swelled with laborers brought up from the slums of New York City and the surrounding urban areas—Jersey City, Newark, and the like. The builders pitted Italian and Eastern European immigrants (“the swarthy races of Europe” as they were denominated) and black migrants from the South, to keep wages low and union organizing unlikely.

All those workers, however, needed things—from opiated pain killers to brooms, tools and jeans. So also did the dislocated, most of whom stayed within 25 miles of their original homes. Many of these were farmers who would not farm again; with their cash payments, they were easy marks for Hawkers, Peddlers and Solicitors who came up from New York to fleece them.

It’s the Building Permits Required stipulation that’s most interesting, though. It marks the line between civilization and wilderness. By requiring building permits, the Town of Olive defined itself as a system of social regulation, a means of mediating the tragedy of the commons.

Out in the country, farmers tend to build what they need. My house started in 1784 as a stone-and-clapboard shed, with a single room downstairs and a ladder leading up to a low sleeping loft. A few good years and the farmer built a shed behind the shed; then a shed next to the shed, then a shed behind that shed. The result was a somewhat eccentric roofline, and places where the floor rose and fell in waves, high where the old foundation walls still mediated the general process of settling-in.

None of these construction projects had plans, or permits, or inspections. Neither did the barn, and when it collapsed early in the 20th century, neither did the new barn that grew up in its place.

Drive around this area nowadays, and if you’re in the right town, out where it’s just town and not village or hamlet, you’ll see a lot of that. Tyvek houses, we call them, though these days, DuPont has begun to lose out to Fiberweb’s Typar. You’ll be forgiven if you mistake the one for the other. They’re the sheets of cladding that get tacked onto the plywood after you’ve poured the concrete and built the balloon frame and cut out the window and door openings, but usually before you’ve gotten to the roof. Tyvek seals the plywood from the weather, and Typar actually boasts of its energy-saving insulating virtues. Over that, you plan to put something; in the housing boom, the McMansions were mostly fake-stone and stucco clad. Before that, it was pretty much vinyl siding all the way.

Riding around, you see a lot of Tyvek and Typar. People who started to build their additions tended to be hovering on the margins of the economy up here. The crash hit them first, and hardest. If they were doing their addition themselves, they probably had a contracting business, or they did some sort of building trades work, or they serviced the weekenders—lawn services, house painting, pet sitting, water treatment (weekenders don’t like sulphur smell in their water, and there are many incrementally more expensive ways to remove the last traces). When the housing boom went south, they were out of luck, and they had payments to make on their pickup trucks and their green-insulation foaming machines, and their zero-turn lawn mowers and the trailers to bring them from wide lawn to wide lawn on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays so the grass on the weekender place is nicely groomed when the tired couple gets up here from the City.

So Tyvek is still the outside cladding of choice. In front of those places, you’ll often see something parked—a Camaro, or an ATV or a dirt bike or a snowmobile—with a For Sale sign on it. Usually the price ends with obo: or best offer. Lately there’s not even a price on most of the stuff—it just says: For Sale: Best Offer. Or Any Offer Considered. When things are really bad, there’s a card table with a plastic painter’s tarp covering the smaller things—a food processor, a video game system.

Over time, the Tyvek starts to peel away, especially if the roof wasn’t completed. Rain gets in between the plywood and the wrap, and it bulges away from the underlying structure.

By then, though, the lawn is usually unmowed, and you won’t see lights come on as the darkness descends on a summer evening. The bank has foreclosed. There aren’t signs advertising the fact; Bank of America can’t be sure it did the foreclosure right, and besides, no one wants this pile of failed hopes. No one except the family that nailed up the plywood for the new kid’s room, and wrapped it in Tyvek.

In the Town of Olive, you’ll see one detail that's missing from the Tyvek houses in the neighboring towns: a piece of yellowing paper taped to the window or the glass of the front door: the building permit. If you walk up close, you can see it expired some time ago—right about 2008.