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.If that.Now twice in barely two years.It's sad.So terribly, terribly sad.At least this time no one was on the bridge, the man said.Thank God for that.Yes.Thank God.Still.This one's going to be mighty nasty to clean up.Alfred looked to the west and realized he hadn't seen a single car coming east along the River Road.The road's really gone, isn't it? he asked.Well, I wouldn't say it's gone, but you can't drive on it.There's a major gorge about half a mile from here, and who knows what's going on beyond that.Probably more damage.The reins were raw where they weren't wrapped in his hands, and when he stretched his fingers, he discovered just how cold his hands had become.Quickly he curled them back into fists around the leather.You should get out of the rain, Mrs.Wallace said to him.We all should.There's nothing to be done now.He turned the horse around, but he couldn't imagine just going home.There was no reason to believe Laura was there yet, not with the roads this bad, and Terry probably wouldn't be coming by now at all.Not with this storm and the damage it was doing: There'd be chaos everywhere he'd have to help clean up.And Paul and Emily weren't at their house, either.And so instead of riding back up the hill, he gave the horse a squeeze and started west toward that immense gash in the road.He'd never seen such a thing, and he might never have the chance again.Besides, a thought was forming in his mind: Although Laura rarely took the River Road, she had to know that the rains might be washing away whole sections of dirt on the notch way, while turning other long stretches to quicksand.Perhaps today of all days she had chosen to come home via the River Road, and somewhere beyond that great hole in the asphalt she was trapped in the storm in her car."I had never seen a train.I was unprepared for it to be so uncomfortable and so noisy.I guess because white people rode them, I had expected it would be like a palace.I had been almost as comfortable in the wagon we'd used to reach Dennison."VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),WPA INTERVIEW,MARCH 1938*PhoebeShe had been driving carefully through country that was almost all snow-covered farmland, and now she was climbing up a series of foothills and at the higher elevation the rain was changing to sleet and--she thought possibly--ice.She was keeping both hands on the wheel at all times, she was pumping her brakes when she needed to slow.She was listening to her music a little softer than usual so she could focus on the conditions of the road and remain alert.Once she looked back to make sure she had remembered to toss her duffel bag into the backseat of her car (she had), but otherwise she stared straight ahead and kept her eyes on the pavement before her.Generally she had been pleasantly surprised.Once she was beyond Eden Mills there'd been little ice on the roads, and even north of there the pavement had been so thoroughly salted that it hadn't been too bad.And she knew it was warmer still to the south, and soon she'd only have to confront rain.Nevertheless, she realized she still had some dicey conditions before her: She was hearing that some roads had been closed by high water--she guessed her first big test would be the Lamoille near Johnson--and there were power lines down in almost every county.But Route 100 had really been pretty good.The key was simply to be slow and cautious, and leave nothing to chance.Ahead of her, at the very end of a straightaway on the ridge she had reached, she saw a small SUV with its hazard lights on, but for a moment she couldn't tell through the sleet on her windshield whether it was at a complete stop or simply forging ahead at a creep, and so she leaned closer to the glass to see better between the wipers.It was stopped, and it was only partway off the road--the drifts to the side had been hammered by rain, but they were still a yard high--and so she started to brake.Abruptly she realized the car was sliding, she'd hit a patch of black ice.She tried to steer into it, aware on some level that this--this patch of slippery glass on the road--was why the SUV had pulled over, but she understood as the rear of her car swung to the side that this knowledge wasn't going to help her.Then she saw she was in the other lane, the wrong lane, and there were headlights coming toward her through the side windows and someone somewhere was pressing a hand down upon a horn.And so she jammed her foot as hard as she could to the floor of the car and rammed the gearshift into park--anything, anything at all, to stop--and, much to her surprise, she was airborne.She was actually off the pavement, spinning, and the lights were getting closer and the horn was getting louder--louder even than the wind and the rain and the wipers--and she thought, Shit, I'm going to have an accident and I just can't afford this!Then, at the moment that she landed back on the ground, her front wheels on the pavement and her rear wheels in the drift to the side, she remembered she was pregnant and she let out a whimper, but she didn't hear the small cry because of the almost deafening crunch of metal upon metal as her car started to collapse all around her."And I knew I was pregnant on the train, and that didn't make the ride any easier.I told George, but not the girls.It was going to be complicated enough when we introduced them to George's brother's family.And so mostly on the train I talked about the buildings, and how some would be taller than any trees they had seen.But even that was difficult, because I'd never seen such a building myself, and only knew of them what other people had told me.It was like describing a rattlesnake if you've never seen one--not even a photograph.I think my children expected the walls would be made of animal hides."VERONICA ROWE (FORMERLY POPPING TREES),WPA INTERVIEW,MARCH 1938*AlfredJust as there were people at the spot along the river where there had once stood a bridge, a small group had gathered just to the east of the first great fissure in the paved road.Again some had driven and some had walked, and he counted nine grown-ups and five teenage boys
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