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it. A big Coca-Cola soda cap was hanging in front of one café, and an Eveready Battery sign was bolted to the wall of a hardware shop. Telephone and electrical poles of poplar ran down one side of the street, black cables snaking out from them to each of the structures. Another shop announced the sale of pianos and organs for cash at good prices. A movie theater was on one corner, a laundry on another. Gas street lamps ran down both sides of the road, like big, lit matchsticks.
    The sidewalks were crowded with folks. They ranged from well-dressed women with stylish hairdos topped by modest hats, to bent, grimy men who, Lou thought, probably toiled here in the coal mines she had read about.
    As they passed through, the last building of significance was also the grandest. It was red brick with an elegant two-story pediment portico, supported by paired Greek Ionic columns, and had a steeply pitched, hammered tin roof painted black, with a brick clock tower top-hatting it. The Virginia and American flags snapped out front in the fine breeze. The elegant red brick, however, sat on a foundation of ugly, scored concrete. This curious pairing struck Lou as akin to fine pants over filthy boots. The carved words above the columns simply read: “Court House.” And then they left the finite sprawl of Dickens behind.
    Lou sat back puzzled. Her father’s stories had been filled with tales of the brutish mountains, and the primitive life there, where hunters squatted near campfires of hickory sticks and cooked their kill and drank their bitter coffee; where farmers rose before the sun and worked the land till they collapsed; where miners dug into the earth, filling their lungs with black that would eventually kill them; and where lumberjacks swept virgin forests clean with the measured strokes of ax and saw. Quick wits, a sound knowledge of the land, and a strong back were essential up here. Danger roamed the steep slopes and loamy valleys, and the magisterial high rock presided over both men and beasts, sharply defining the limits of their ambition, of their lives. A place like Dickens, with its paved roads, hotel, Coca-Cola signs, and pianos for cash at good prices, had no right to be here. Yet Lou suddenly realized that the time period her father had written about had been well over twenty years ago.
    She sighed. Everything, even the mountains and its people, apparently, changed. Now Lou assumed her great-grandmother probably lived in a quite ordinary neighborhood with quite ordinary neighbors. Perhaps she had a cat and went to have her hair done every Saturday at a shop that smelled of chemicals and cigarette smoke. Lou and Oz would drink orange soda pop on the front porch and go to church on Sunday and wave to people as they passed in their cars, and life would not be all that much different than it had been in New York. And while there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, it was not the dense, breathtaking wilderness Lou had been expecting. It was not the life her father had experienced and then written about, and Lou was clearly disappointed.
    The car passed through more miles of trees, soaring rock and dipping valleys, and then Lou saw another sign. This town was named Tremont. This was probably it, she thought. Tremont appeared roughly one-third the size of Dickens. About fifteen cars were slant-parked in front of shops similar to those in the larger town, only there was no high-rise building, no courthouse, and the asphalt road had given way to macadam and gravel. Lou also spotted the occasional horse rider, and then Tremont was behind them, and the ground moved higher still. Her great-grandmother, Lou surmised, must live on the outskirts of Tremont.
    The next place they passed had no sign naming its location, and the scant number of buildings and few people they saw didn’t seem enough to justify a name. The road was now dirt, and the Hudson swayed from side to side over this humble pack of shifting earth. Lou saw a