Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,1

the hospital, in the market, someone would always say, “Can they really do that?” The answer was yes. “They can do what they want,” my mother said, and when she did, Donald’s grandfather held his file in front of him like a shield and said, “Miriam, I don’t think you understand the situation.” But that wasn’t true. My mother always understood the situation. Any situation.

“I figure by my breathing I’ll be gone by Sunday,” she said years later when she was dying, and she was right on schedule.

At all the meetings they handed out little pamphlets with a drawing on the front of people walking around the edge of what looked like a big lake. There were sailboats, too, and a woman behind a motorboat on water skis with one arm held up in the air. Inside the pamphlet said, “Flood control, water supply, hydroelectric power, and recreation: these are the advantages of water management in your area!” On the back it said, “A bright future through progress.” It’s a wiggly word, progress: a two-lane gravel road turned into four lanes paved that makes life a noisy misery for the people with houses there, a cornfield turned into a strip mall with a hair salon, a supermarket, and a car wash. Corn’s better than a car wash. We washed our own cars with a garden hose until our kids got old enough to do it for us.

My eldest nephew, the smart one, did a project once about Miller’s Valley, and he interviewed me one afternoon. “Why didn’t you fight?” he said.

I understand. He’s young. Things seem simple when you’re young. I remember. I’m not like some older people who forget.

There were people who fought, although there were fewer and fewer of them as the years went by. Donald’s grandfather had printed up bumper stickers and buttons and tried to get people riled up, but there weren’t that many people to begin with in the valley, and by the time it was all over there were hardly any at all.

I may have been the only person living in Miller’s Valley who had read all the geologists’ reports, looked over all the maps, knew what was really going on. Somewhere there’s an aerial photograph taken before I was even born, and if any reasonable person looked at it, at the dam and the course of the river and the unused land and the number of houses involved, they’d conclude that there was a big low area just begging to be filled in with water. I’d seen that photograph when I was seventeen, sitting in a government office with gray walls and metal furniture, looking at the center point of that big low area, at the roof of our house. I knew better than anyone what the deal was. When I was a kid I’d play in the creek, stack up stones and sticks and watch the water back up behind them, until finally it filled a place that had been dry before. The difference is that with a real dam, sometimes the place that fills up with water has houses and churches and farms. I saw a picture once of a big reservoir behind a dam in Europe that had a church steeple sticking up on one side during a dry spell.

That’s what they meant when they talked about water management, the government people, except that we didn’t have a steeple high enough in the valley to stick up and remind people that there had once been a place where the water would be. A bright future through progress. There was just a handful of us in the way.

Everyone was waiting for my mother to fight, although no one ever said that. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn’t do this, take 6,400 acres of old family farms and small ramshackle homes and turn it into a reservoir by using the dam to divert the river. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn’t just disappear our lives, put a smooth dark ceiling of water over everything as though we had never plowed, played, married, died, lived in Miller’s Valley. It wasn’t just that my mother had lived in the valley, had dealt with the water, her whole life long. It wasn’t just that she was the kind of person who preferred to solve her problems by herself, not have some people come in from outside in suits and ties and work shoes that weren’t work shoes