“Well, maybe we could talk about the price again after you’ve seen it,” Mr. Chapman said. “And after you see what your husband’s got to say. I’ll tell you the truth, it’s a bargaining price, it’s not a solid one. It’ll take some discussing.”

We curled off the expressway and onto a more rural highway. The towns here were smaller, but no more attractive to me than the little cities we had been passing. I knew these places, too, from far back in childhood.

We made more turns. I had lost track of where we were, would have to ask Mr. Chapman for directions if Stephen and I were to come up, until finally we turned onto a narrow gravel road with deep ditches at each side, flowing heavily with the water of early spring. It seemed instantly very quiet, as if the trees and bushes and water overpowered the sound of the car. It was a kind of tunnel, this road shrouded by the trees, and I was startled when we met another car a little distance along and Mr. Chapman had to ease far over to the right to let it edge by.

“Just a few farmers up this way,” he said, “cattle pretty well, there’s not much else to be done with land like this. It’s poor country, nobody makes more than just enough to get by. They’re all small farmers; it’ll all be gone one of these days, not for development for a while yet, but most likely to people like yourselves, wanting to get away from the city. There’s no point in most of these old guys hanging on, there’s nobody to take over the farms from them, nobody wants to live like that any more.

“I tell you, if you think about it, farmers are bigger gamblers than anybody who goes off to Vegas. There’s this guy my dad used to know up here, used to come over and visit now and then, and I tell you, he’d be buying spring stock and he’d graze them over the summer and hope the prices went up for when he sold them in the fall; had to sell them in the fall, couldn’t afford to winter them because he couldn’t grow enough feed on his place, and sometimes the prices would be ’way down and he’d lose thousands of dollars, no choice, just a gamble every spring on what would be happening with prices six or eight months ahead.”