See You in a Hundred Years

Now, as the wagon trundles along, my eye follows our forty-acre pasture, the first patch of ground we’ve ever owned, as it slopes gently up to a ridge. On the opposite side of the road, a stream slips through a neighbor’s field, thick with spring grass. We round a bend, top a small rise, and the twin totem poles marking the entrance to Camp Shenandoah, Boy Scouts of America, rise to greet us. Beyond that, it’s all trees, 18,000 acres of mountainside state forest. If Elim was a little patch of hell on earth, here we’ve landed in heaven.

We sit without speaking, listening to the rasp of the steel tread on gravel, soaking up the new sensations, enjoying a respite from the squabbling that has threatened to undo both our plans and our marriage.

“I can’t believe we’re actually doing this,” says Heather, her smile stretching from ear to ear. We look into each other’s eyes, and our gaze lingers for the first time in a long while.

“I can’t either,” I say. I glance at Luther, whose chin bobs gently on his chest. He is asleep.

Yet here we are, all the details of our plan nearly in place. In the kitchen is a wood-burning cookstove. A pair of milk goats nibble grass in the barnyard. Half a dozen chickens scratch around a henhouse with southern exposure, exclusive garden access, high ceilings, and the old-world charm of exposed oak and heart-pine timbers―in short, a space to rival our first Manhattan apartment. Looming over it is our 100-year-old barn, as big as a high school gym. The outhouse stands atop a freshly dug hole. Soon the well-driller will come to pull the electric pump and install a manual one in its place. Made of cast-iron, painted fire-engine red, and with a long lever arm jutting to one side, it arrived by mail order the other day looking like a prop from the set of Petticoat Junction.

After months of stripping the twenty-first century out of our lives piece by piece, I am beginning to feel the transformation.

Excerpted from See You in a Hundred Years by Logan Ward. Copyright © 2007 by Logan Ward. Reprinted by arrangement with The Random House Publishing Group.

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