Free gas for life, her parents read in the Zillow description. Not a selling point but a perk.

Free anything for life is a perk. They’d always hoped to go all-electric, but they were used

to gas. Gas wasn’t going anywhere, not for a long time—that big shift was for the next

generation. They went to see the property and fell in love. Nine acres, plus some forty

surrounding their lot, all forested, owned by the gas company. Privacy, privacy. All that

space. They’d just have to live with a pipeline cutting through the trees, across the land.

They decided they could deal with that. They signed. They popped real champagne and

planted pine-nut trees that don’t produce for twenty years but that was fine, for they’d

found their forever. They dug a well, built a coop, went to bed, and conceived her.

Deep in the gas company’s forest there is a chainlinked-away acre with an ever-pumping

rig. Around the rig is land kept clear: mown/shorn, graveled/tamped, weeded/whacked.

There’s a control hut that’s always locked. A gas company-man in a reflective vest and

hard hat drives the access road monthly in a pickup, tends the acre, enters the control

hut, and leaves. Her parents take her to it when she’s five, following the great sterile

pipeline through the woods. They bring the dog, who bounds ahead and returns, bounds

ahead and returns, pisses on the pipeline many times. It’s a long walk. She makes it longer

by stopping to touch neon lichens on the bark of trees and asking what birds are saying

when they caw, what salamanders mean when they flick their tails. They answer her

cheerfully. It’s a long cheerful walk through the woods. But the chainlink eventually

appears, a harsh glint within the softness that’d been all around. A big white sign scrawled

with red. She asks what it says, what it means. Her parents tell her, No trespassing. No

trespass what? They point to the bucking, rearing horsehead of the rig.

The land was good. The property was what her parents’ dreamt of always. The perfect

place to raise a family — one daughter, themselves, and all the animals. They wished to

cast a dome around it, to own the atmosphere as well as the soil, heaven and earth. For if

it were up to them, if they could run the world, it would all be good. It would be clean for

everyone — the air, the water, all the living matter. But they did not run the world, only

their nine acres, which they tried to keep good and clean for their daughter and for all

their animals. Agroforestry. Permaculture. No-Till. All as best they could. Yet the nine

acres belonged the world, not her parents, and the forested-forty belonged to the world,

not the gas company, and there was no dome they could cast over any of it, nobody

could, no matter the wishing or the working hard. A stranger with a clipboard came once,

looked at the big house, the spacious acreage, and asked, Could you take in a guest-

family? Said, This family lost their home to the hurricane. The city is gone. There’s

nowhere else for them to go. Her parents apologized, answered, No, and felt terrible

about it for a long time.

She grows up eating fresh vegetables, fresh eggs, fresh meat from rabbits and fowl cooked

for her on a gas stove. The way it’s meant to be, her parents say, cleaning out the game

and the twenty-two. But all of it’s lessening. First the fowl then the vegetables then the

rabbits. Not disappearing, but lessening. Losing minerals and getting thin. Still young she

remembers being younger and walking in the forested, hearing the cawing of birds, seeing

the salamander, the many impossible greens in moss. She walks there today and sees so

much less. Her parents talk of sad city kids with asthma and deficiencies. They tell her,

We didn’t want that for you, as they sit coughing together in the garden, for there’s a

wildfire ten states away. When the dog starts wheezing they retire, close the windows,

install an air-purification system that filters more particulates per million. Inside, taking

online courses in green home design, frightful of the choking smoggy elsewhere that is

everywhere but this house, these acres, she’ll turn twenty-two, looking out the window at

pine-nut trees that have never produced.

Pine-nuts have iron, protein, and vitamin E. Healthy fats. Magnesium. As they’d planted

the saplings, her parents had thought, These will be good for our daughter and, someday,

her children. They thought of many future generations of their family growing up on

these acres with no deficiencies, full of healthy fats and lean protein. But she told her

parents, I won’t bear a child. They asked her why and she motioned out the window, at

the tall nutless trees. They thought again of a dome, ached for it. They wondered, What

more could we have done? Inside their home purifiers hummed while, in the chainlinked-

away acre, the horsehead of the gas company’s rig rose and fell. Rose and fell, until —

She feels the caesura — a suddenness opening wide. Something halting. Not the turn of

the earth but the ache of it. She asks her parents, What is that? They’re looking up too,

they’ve sensed it too, as if the grumbling running engine just stopped grumbling. They’re

not sure what it is. They follow the feeling outside, along the pipeline, all the way to the

chainlinked-away acre and there they see that the bucking, rearing horsehead of the rig

has gone still. They curl their fingers around the chainlink and stare in awe. A gas

company-man steps out of the control hut. When her parents ask what’s happened he

tells them, Well’s run dry. Her parents tremble. They ask, Where will our free gas come

from? He shrugs. He doesn’t know. Most folks have electrified, he says. He nods to them

with his hard-hatted head, gets in his pickup and leaves. She says, This is a good change,

but her parents are frightened, they feel left-behind, they never thought it’d really

happen, that the shift would ever come. Free gas for life, they murmur. A downy

woodpecker lands on the horsehead and pecks, echoing metal-empty through the woods.

Though she presented them with detailed plans, sketched up in her green home design

course, her parents believed they were too old to start the process of whole home

electrification. They looked at her, childless, and thought, What would it be for anyway?

They looked at all of it, all of theirs, their animals and their acres, their well-maintained

twenty-two hung above their door, their red hand-pump of their well, their gazebo in

their shade. They looked at their one childless daughter and thought, If we’d done it years

ago, then maybe. They told her, No, then they bought the forty forested acres from the

folding gas company. They left the silent pipeline where it stood, and the motionless rig.

They didn’t think they could afford to remove it, their retirement had dwindled greatly

from the purchase of the land, and in the back of their minds, they’d started thinking of a

power source that lasts, they’d started thinking of the future beyond their own, of their

one childless daughter who’d grow old in their beloved home, how they’d want her to be

comfortable, to be happy, in that future. Would that require electrification? They

wondered. They looked back at her plans. We can do this for her, they thought.

When a stranger with a clipboard knocks on the door this time, it’s she who answers.

Asks, How can I help you? And the stranger says, You’ve heard about the hurricane and

the sixth extinction, the fire, the famine, the conflict, the hunger, the sea-swell, the dune

wall failing, the coastal erosion, the flood, the topsoil, the bleaching, the blight, the bees,

the chemical spill, the spreading aridity, the typhoon with this name, the typhoon with

that name, the freshwater reserve, the ice cap, the heat wave, the new plague arriving, the

old plague coming back, and what’s left of the breathable sky? You’ve heard about it.

You’re living it too, you know. You’re not under a dome, but your land, your home, is

good. You have so much, you know. All this space. Do you have some to spare for a

family who’s lost everything? She answers, I do. Later that evening she talks it over with

her parents. They’re frightened. It would be such a change. Yes, she says. But it would be

a good change.

They applied for and received a green building grant. The organization was impressed by

the thoughtfulness with which the neighborhood was designed, so well-integrated into the

existing landscape. In the forest they broke ground on ten two-bedroom houses. Small

footprints. Footpaths from lot to lot. One winding access road for moving and

emergencies, otherwise carless. A communal pavilion with a woodstove and round tables.

Each house was equipped with its own water-recycler, solar-tower, and greenhouse. The

people moved in — they’d had nowhere else, then they were here.

With a neighbor’s recipe, she flavors hummus using pine-nuts from the trees — their crop

grows more abundant every year. Her parents got to taste it before they died and of its

flavor, of its existence, they’d said, All for this. She takes the walk from her house to the

neighbor’s, to deliver a batch of the hummus and ask, Did I get it right this time? Does it

taste like yours? The neighbor will say, It’s delicious, but she’ll know she’s still missing

something. Too much lemon, maybe, or not enough. The walk takes her along the

pipeline, past the rusted horsehead of the rig. They removed the chainlink years ago and

the tamped-down gravel’s grown into meadow — dog violet, foxglove, oxeye, sorrel.

Impossibly green moss. But the pipeline, the rig, the control hut remain. Crumble, but

remain. She sees the gentle glint of sunlight, ahead where meadow interrupts forest, and

as she approaches she hears a dull knock-knocking. Knock-knocking. In a rusted cavity in

the long head of the rig, a downy woodpecker’s made a nest. She rests contentedly in it.

Her mate hops along the top of the rig, pecking the metal for grub, before he remembers

the nearby tree, the softer wood, and flies away.