The Freeway Comes

Raymond worked the grade north of the railroad tracks all that fall, on the laborer’s crew, walking behind the scrapers with a shovel and a grade stick while the machines tore the long trench that was going to be the freeway out of the middle of the town.

He was nineteen. He had grown up at the Colony by the river, east of downtown, in the house his mother Lena had kept when the man from the agency came around in the fifties with his forms and his train tickets to Los Angeles, and Lena had not signed, and they had stayed, and Raymond had grown up here instead of in a city where no one knew his name. His mother had cleaned rooms downtown for twenty years. His grandfather Joseph had watched the town vote in the gambling. His people had been in this valley, the Washoe, for longer than anyone could count, before the railroad, before the ranches, when the Truckee Meadows was a place you came to in the warm months and the river ran where it wanted.

The river did not run where it wanted anymore. The Army engineers had been at it a few years back, straightening it, walling its banks, turning it into a thing that went where the town told it to go. And now the town was building the road, and Raymond was building it with them.

The foreman had put him on with the laborers because his uncle knew a man in the local, and the work was steady and the pay was union pay, better than the ranches, better than anything he had had, and he was glad of it and he did not let himself think too hard about what they were doing. They were cutting a canyon. That was the truth of it. They were cutting a canyon through the built-up part of the town, below the level of the streets, so the cars could run through Reno without stopping, from the Sierra to the salt flats, and where the canyon went the houses came down.

He had watched them come down all fall. The blocks north of Fourth Street, the old motor courts and the frame houses and the little stores, the engineers had bought them or condemned them and the wrecking crews had gone in ahead of the scrapers, and Raymond had walked the cleared ground afterward with his grade stick, ground where a week before there had been a kitchen and a porch and someone’s line of wash, and now there was only the torn dirt and the smell of broken plaster and the machines.

At the noon break he sat with the crew in the lee of a parked dozer and ate from his pail. A man named Pelletier, who had been on the highways thirty years, nodded up the slope toward the north, toward the university on its hill, where a row of old houses stood along Center Street above the cut, tall narrow houses with porches, the kind the professors had lived in since before the century turned.

“They say the road’ll take those too, before it’s done,” Pelletier said. “Or the school will. One or the other. Last of the old ones up there.”

Raymond looked at the houses. They stood in a line along the street with their gables against the sky, and they did not know yet what Raymond knew, which was that a thing did not have to be bad or in the way to come down. It only had to be in the path of the line some men had drawn on a map in an office, and the line went where it went, and what stood on the line came down, and the men who drew the line were not the men who swung the hammer. The men who swung the hammer were men like Raymond, who needed the work.

“Bitter thing,” Pelletier said, but he said it the way a man says it about the weather, and went back to his sandwich.

In the afternoon they cut deeper. The big scrapers came down the grade loaded and went back up empty, all day, carrying the town away a blade at a time, and the dust hung over the cut and drifted down toward the river, and the noise of it filled the whole bottom of the valley so that you could not hear the river at all, could not hear anything that was not the engines. Raymond worked the grade behind them. He set his stick and read the cut and waved the blade man up or down. He was good at it. He had a feel for the lay of the ground that the foreman had noticed and remarked on, and Raymond had not told him where the feel came from, that it came from people who had read this ground for six thousand years, who had known where the water ran and where the pine nuts grew and where to be in the cold months and where to be in the warm, the whole valley held in the family the way you hold a thing you love.

Near quitting time he stood at the bottom of the cut and looked up at the raw walls of it, twenty feet of torn earth on either side, and beyond the south wall, if he could have seen through it, was the river the engineers had walled, and beyond the river was the Colony where his mother would be home from work and starting the supper, and beyond the Colony, out past the edge of the town, the open country ran up to the mountains the way it always had, the way it had before any of this, and would after.

The whistle blew. The machines wound down one by one and the great noise drained out of the valley and left a ringing quiet, and into the quiet, faint, from somewhere past the south wall of the cut, Raymond could hear the river again, going where they had told it to go.

He shouldered his shovel and climbed up out of the canyon he was helping to dig, toward the road home.

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