The Path, part three: Compleat fiction. Sci-Fi in fact so be warned.

Sometimes I wonder if the path I tramped into the soil between the Old Homestead on Baranga Hill and the Millers place is still there. Back then in Year 355 after the first landing on Middle Earth, Baranga Hill was a good fifty miles north of the original colony landing site and still considered raw frontier. I’d learned early on that the cookie Mom would deny me at home could be had with just a quick trip to the Millers house on the land they called Eden Valley. The land our house sat on, and that between us and the Millers had been well fenced, so even at a tender five years I didn’t have to worry about wild wargs. During the long hot summers of childhood that path would also lead to where I could nip into Adda Miller’s kitchen to snatch a salt shaker before raiding the cherry tomato patch Orra Miller always planted.

At least once a week my Mom’s feet would join mine on that path as we went to the Miller’s house to share the weekly chore of washing using the home made washer kept outside just below Adda’s kitchen window. All the Miller’s sons were grown and gone on to other settlements by then and the Miller’s treated us like family. Mine, and all the ladies clothes were washed separately with the under clothes. To save money the men’s work clothes were brought home from the space port to be laundered separately, then ironed.

Dad told me he’d met Orra at that space port when he had first come to the Middle Earth Colony in the second wave of settlement. Orra had helped him get a job there and, when he married my mom, Orra had even helped Dad get the land allotment next to his.

Oh, how I wanted to help with the laundry so I could play with that old fashioned contraption Orra and Dad had built. But adult caution kept me away from that fascinating machinery.

“No, you may NOT put the clothes through the wringer!” Mom would yelp when I asked. “That thing could squash your fingers clean off! Then how’d you do your school work on the computer?”

“Wouldn’t lose’m if I didn’t let’m get caught!” I would mutter as I angrily stalked off to sooth my hurt feelings with one of Adda’s sugar cookies. “Side’s the doctors down in town’d jus’ grow’um back.” Sometimes I wanted to accidentally break either the teaching computer, or the antenna that brought in the education programs from the town that had sprung up around the old landing site. But then I’d have not been able to use it to find out about other, more fascinating things.

Where there is an old time washer there must be a clothesline. Orra and Dad had built a huge clothesline in the fenced orchard between our two house plots. There were three uprights made with plastcrete beams left over from building the colony’s space port. The two men welded metal cross pieces on to it. Those held up four thick wire lines. These lines stretched east / west across my path down to the Millers house. That part of the path was in a clearing. With no trees over the lines, any clothes hung on them could get sun all day. This was important on cool or damp days when it took more time than in the hot, dry summer for the clothes to dry.

As I grew taller, around the colony year 360, I found myself hauling clothes Mom had washed at home, in a cleaner built by the colony’s new factory where Dad had gone to work, to that clothesline. Thus eroding that path just a little deeper. After Orra was killed building the Katy Dam that was needed to provide more power, and water for the factories; I pounded it deeper still going to Adda’s house to get the washing she needed done. I took it up to our house where Mom would wash it in her modern clothing cleaner.

Adda really needed the help by that time as one of those super bugs had infected her eye’s, blinding her, when she went in for new cornea’s. That was really sad as she had already had her last rejuvenation treatment fifty years before my birth and would never have the chance to grow new ones. She could take care of most things herself, but my folks and I helped with the farming and such. When the clothes were crisp from the cleaner and folded, I’d haul them back to Adda’s along that same path that went under the now seldom used clothesline.

By the time I left to go to the orbital University for college in 368 the path was worn so deep it was still there whenever I was able to come home from school. It was just part of home, the quickest route down to check on Adda. She was still getting along on her own, but was starting to complain that her boy’s weren’t coming around to help or even calling to see how she was anymore. Her eldest was already into his second rejuve.

After earning a basic degree, then four years in Star Forces, and a failed attempt at setting up a geologic mapping business over in one of First Continents other settlements, my old course along that path was reversed. Adda’s boys had told her to sell off most of Eden Valley as they weren‘t interested in farming, nor were any of their kids. It was 377, there was a spiffy new space port, bringing in a lot of a softer breed of colonist, and the population pressure of folks who had no intention of roughing it, had forced my folks to sell off most of their land. Adda’s boys were paying me to be live-in care for her and what acreage she had left. I was saving the money so I could go back for a master degree in Permaculture at our local college. I had to go up to visit Mom and Dad occasionally on what was left of the Old Homestead, just to keep in touch. I was an only child after all.

It was a good thing that path was still there when I came home in the spring of 382 for my father’s and then Adda’s funeral as grief hung over me like a dark cloud. I moved on automatic between the two houses during the family gatherings centered on these two tragedies. Adda’s death was acceptable, even expected, but my dad hadn’t even gotten old enough for his first rejuve yet. Even after leaving school for the last time that year with a brand new master’s degree I felt surrounded by loss, by death. Change had accelerated while I was at school. Baranga Hill and Eden Valley were now a subdivision outside of the sprawling capital of Middle Earth colony. Despite that I bought out Adda’s youngest son who had inherited what was left of Adda’s land. Mostly, I bought it to keep new homes from being built too close to me. I added it to what I inherited when my mom died, in an air car accident two years after her first rejuve. By this time the population around my land was nearly as dense as it was nearer New Washington itself, and I was working hard on the Planning and Land Use Committee to keep our growth from destroying Middle Earth as it had Old Earth. I was heart sick at our suggestions always being overridden in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘profit’.

Then the Uppies came out from old earth; the ones who cared not a whit for the land, or the people who lived there. All they cared about was ‘upping’ their personal wealth.

“Hey! Hi, there! My name’s Muffie! My husband and I bought a lot just down the street and a block over from here! We’re getting up this petition to change the ordinances to keep farm animals and other large beasts out of the neighborhood. We’d like you to sign it!” The woman said perkily after I got off the ridding grass harvester and came over to see what she wanted.

“What do you mean by farm animals?” I asked, leaning on the wide double gate across my driveway. The gate kept my tame warg and my horse as well as my partner’s safely on my 10 acres. Hopefully, it would keep Earth bred dogs out as I was thinking of getting some more chickens. A warg won’t touch anything with feathers. They can’t digest feathers and any thing that small they’d eat whole.

“Oh, you know,” she grinned, “The smelly and noisy ones like chickens, goats and horses.” Her face showed her revulsion. “And those horrible big dogs! They can get out so easily and frighten people! Not to mention the loud barking!”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed in the highest fashion from old Earth. Right down to the high heels wobbling on my gravel driveway. Her big fancy air car was floating right at the end of it. I hadn’t been paying attention while I was running the grass harvester but I doubted she’d walked from the house next door. I turned toward what was left of my ancestral land, and whistled a couple of loud notes before turning back to the Uppie. I knew what that whistle would call up.

“Why?” I asked as I turned back. “Why no animals like that?”

“Why, because they lower property values! We’ll never get the property in this neighborhood up to a decent value with all these farm animals around.” Her voice was emphatic even though she obviously wondered why I’d whistled.

“Now why would we want the property values to go up?” I asked reasonably, as my, and my partner’s tame wargs loped up in answer to my whistle. “You do know that’d just cause these damn new land taxes to go up even further, don’t you?” She’d turned white at the sight of the fearsome looking wargs.

“B-but,” she stammered as our horses came out of the shade of the orchard behind me, and her eyes widened further. “T-then you could sell your property for more?”

“But not enough to buy anything where we could keep our critters,” I pointed out. “Not here in New Washington. And some of us old timers here might not want, or be able to move. So you just keep that silly petition. I hope to hell no one is dumb enough to sign it. Bye.” I turned from her and walked back to the house to make a glass of lemonade. I almost started crying as I sat in the shade of a fig tree I’d ‘helped’ Dad and Orra plant beside the drive way, and drank my ice cold lemonade. I knew that Uppy was just the first salvo of faster, more drastic change. Change I couldn’t stop.

That path and the clothesline were still there when I sold out and moved to the Shire, a settlement on the last continent opened on Middle Earth. As the Master Permaculture Designer for the Shire I have a good bit of say on how we grow this place so I’m doing my best to set it up to stay in harmony with the planet. I don’t know if the Uppies got their silly petition passed. I do know that before I finely sold out, the city tore up the creek just South of mine and the Millers old houses to “improve drainage.” It was the creek that had run through the Millers old Eden Valley. The one where I’d learned the basics of geology from my Dad.

Then the police air cars started shattering the night with their low flying whine, sirens, and the bright light they used to look for the criminals who started hiding out in what was by then a plastcrete drainage ditch. The stolen air car found abandoned there was the last straw. New Washington and the greedy ways it had imported from old Earth was oozing out to envelop me, my animals, and my land. The only things I could pick up and move to safety were myself and my beasts.

I bought a place with the settlers headed for that last uninhabited continent on Middle Earth. It took all the money my parents had left to me plus most of what I managed to get for the land, and my severance pay from the Planning Committee. I, and my new partner, with the help of some relatives who really couldn’t understand our need to leave, loaded up an intercontinental shipping, and livestock container before taking off one warm day in February of 385. We headed for the Shire and a life far from the problems of big cities.

For me that move was as if my parents, and the Millers had died again. I had hoped to live out all my lives on that land. Now, I’m spending my first rejuvenated youth building a new life here in the Shire.

The clothesline is surely gone by now. The land divided up into at least ten city blocks, maybe more, with “little houses made of ticky tacky” built on them, if not a mall. Perhaps even the path is gone.

Yet, in a way that foot path goes on. I’m wearing extensions of it on the allotment acres I’ve bought here in the Shire. Paths I’m wearing on land bought with money left to me by my parents, and from the sell of the land I’d worn that old path on. So, perhaps Tolkien was right. The path does “go ever on” from the place where it begins. After all, after my third and last rejuve treatment, maybe I’ll finely settle down and start a family to leave this land to.