The Last of the Lumbermen by Brian Fawcett Page B

is.
    â€œSonofabitch,” I say aloud. No, that’s exactly wr ong. The “bitch” involved isn’t a bitch, she’s Esther. And her son is my son. This afternoon’s upset takes on an entire new dimension — and so do my chippy remarks about Wendel.
    I pick up and pay for the Chinese food with two twenty-dollar bills, by now completely distracted. I’m two blocks down the street before I realize I gave the cashier a seventeen-dollar tip. No wonder she knows me by name.
    ESTHER AND I LIVE near the top of Cranberry Ridge, just west of the city. It’s a good place to live, barely developed until recently, with fine farmland further west and deep, rich soils. The ridge is one-hundr ed-and-fifty-or-so metres above the river, and a little colder than down below, with mor e snow. And this winter, the drive up ther e has been more of an adventure than it usually is.
    The reason getting up Cranberry Ridge is an adventure is the same reason it’s good farmland. It, and the entire plateau that runs twenty miles to the west of town, is composed of fine, soft clay up to two hundr ed metres down, alluvial fan laid down ten thousand years ago when the glaciers receded. Left undisturbed, Cranberry Ridge looks much like any other piece of real estate in the North, except that its deeper soil supports deciduous trees, mostly poplar and birch. But if you mess with this kind of soil it turns into quagmire, and if it’s disturbed, it will slide downhill. Because of this, the original road up Cranberry Ridge was built carefully and at small scale, and it was steep. Even then it had its share of problems — shifting grades and the occasional mudslide.
    That changed a couple of years ago after the City conned the government into building a university in Mantua. Since every- one involved, locally or otherwise, was a certified idiot with delusions of grandeur, they set out to make appropriately grand, idiotic decisions. The first one — and the biggest piece of idiocy — was to choose the least stable building site within a hundred-kilometre radius. They chose the top of Cranberry Ridge instead of the derelict downtown where everyone with half a deck knew it should have been. The result is what aesthetes without common sense usually deliver: a nice viewpoint for visiting dignitaries to see how bad Mantua’s air pollution is, and a flood of cost overruns.
    The fun started when the government’s contractors tried to build a four-lane highway up the side of the Ridge. The Ridge didn’t co-operate. The road-bed slipped, so the government contractors licked their lips and rebuilt, gouging deeper into the clay , which slipped again. Since then it’s been the Chinese fi re drill: underground springs opening up, new cr eeks emerging, the Ridge slipping more, and so on. The site where they’re trying to build the university buildings is nearly as unstable. Let’s just say that the announcement that a university was coming to town may turn out to be unintentionally prophetic.
    All this would be amusing as hell if the road hadn’t already cost fifteen-million dollars they could have used to rebuild the downtown, and — not incidentally — if it weren’t making getting home a royal pain in the ass for Esther and me. I’ve had to take the long way around more often than I’d care to count since they started, and that entails almost forty klicks of gravel road — mushy, muddy gravel when it’s been raining. When spring breakup comes this April, after the latest round of construc tion, the long way around is likely to be the only route we’ll have.
    Tonight, though, the road isn’t too bad — at least until I’m closing in on the hairpin curve near the top. Right there, an overconfident moron in a Ford Explorer loses cont rol in the curve and does a one-eighty-degree four -wheel drift in front of me. A second or two elongates into an