Jedediah's Throne

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck?

Trucker Andy Prewitt would have traded this problem for almost any other. Andy hailed from a small town near Denver, Colorado, had been driving for several years, and had never seen a tractor-trailer wreck like the one he was about to have. Worse, he had no idea at all there was any problem. At that moment, he was more than two thousand miles from home and was hurtling down the highway at more than seventy miles per hour with a sixty-nine-thousand pound load behind him. Andy had just missed his exit, and he was fast asleep.

Not far away from the speeding tractor-trailer and getting closer to it by the millisecond, a proud young Pennsylvania woodchuck stood upon a great stone outcropping, surveying his extensive domain on a beautiful, peaceful spring morning. Who would have ever believed, this little animal would have greater effect on events to follow than the imminent crash? For want of a woodchuck name, we shall call him Jedediah. As it was a rural setting, Jedediah was about to become the only on-site witness to a terrible accident.

Jedediah had been keenly aware that something was going to happen that day. He also sensed it was going to be big. In a few more seconds, he would know much more about just how big. For just above Jedediah's stone perch and atop a very steep hillside, the four-lane highway made a sweeping bend to the left, while Andy's speeding rig did not.

Suddenly, Jedediah both heard and felt a terrifying bumping, so powerful that it shook the ground beneath him. He whirled around and looked up the hill toward the source, just in time to see Andy Prewitt's tractor and trailer blasting through the guardrails, directly above. There could be no question at all that something was terribly wrong. Jedediah was too startled to think about his burrow, and he ran for his life, tearing down over the hill, tumbling head-over-heels and then quickly hiding in some tall grass next to the trunk of a dead tree. Safely away, Jedediah stayed hidden and watched the airborne goings-on as they blew past.

You wouldn't need an engineer, physicist or ballistics expert to tell you that even at its speed of launch, the rig wouldn't be aloft for long. Its trajectory was anything but flat; the huge, fire-engine red Peterbilt tractor led the earthward arc of steel and the brilliant silver of a fully-loaded, aluminum-walled trailer. Eighteen tires spinning, some on flashing polished wheels, gigantic steel springs and pneumatic brake tanks, rending couplings and tearing lines, all floated past Jedediah in a matter of an instant. Had a trucker been standing there to witness, it would have been no less heart-rending than the sight of a great ship slipping beneath the waves would have been to a stranded seaman in a lifeboat.

The inertia of the great mass of machinery and cargo was enough, however, that the impact with the heavy steel guardrails didn't roll the tractor over. Jedediah crouched in terror as both tractor and trailer impacted the tall trees, snapping off the first of them above the halfway point. As the assembly of tractor and trailer became separated, the trailer was smashed to fragments and its contents of heavy plastic barrels freed. The heavy steel skin of the tractor was pummeled by several dozen impacts with more trees, all but the very last of them giving way, either uprooting or breaking off. When at last the great tractor came to rest, it was actually on its wheels, but resembled a big Coca-Cola can that had been crushed by a giant.

Inside the mangled cab was the luckiest man alive, the misfortune of a trucker's career-ending wreck notwithstanding. Andy had awakened just in time to see blue sky and green treetops, and was almost instantly treated to a ride he was not yet awake enough to fully appreciate. He wasn't even quite sure it had been a wreck. Upon the bent and glass-shard-covered dashboard, there had once been installed a real corded telephone handset, because he had tired of losing his cell phone. Of course it had been knocked free of its cradle, so he reached for the cord with a bloodied right hand and pulled it up to grasp it. His left arm had been broken by repeated impacts against the door, but at that moment, Andy only knew that it hurt. Heavily dazed, the burly young trucker pressed the handset to his ear and addressed the perennial protector of his childhood, who wasn't there just yet: "Mommy?"

Five hundred feet below the highway, an older woman was sitting in her kitchen, hand-entering the month's receipts from her business in an aging ledger. She had been completely oblivious to anything other than the numbers before her.

Fannie Wallace and her husband had made their home at the bottom of Jedediah's hill nearly forty years earlier. They'd moved here from Alabama, and they had bought an old house and garage along the lower road. It was a busy two-lane paved road that, at that time, had been the only highway through the gap between these steep Pennsylvania hills. Fanny's husband Harry had converted the old garage to a tire shop. At first Harry just bought tires and sold tires, but after a while, he tore the old building down and built a bigger one, this one a little further back from the pavement. Harry then set up a tire-retreading operation, and he operated both businesses from the same location.

But then, the department of transportation had done something unexpected. They built a new four-lane, limited-access concrete highway at nearly the top of the hill, and thus redirected most of Harry's customers away from his shop. So Harry adjusted by closing the retail tire sales operation, and he concentrated on re-treading tires for other retailers. As time went by, fewer people bought retreaded tires, so the business soon relied on capping tires for mostly big trucks. Wallace Truck and Bus Retreads were now known far and wide by tire dealers.

But Harry's heart and all of that hard work eventually had a disagreement. So Fannie, now widowed and in her sixties, relied mostly on her son Tom and one other employee, big Harve, to run the ovens and the machinery. Fannie made business contacts, did the invoicing and record keeping and took the orders, and once a week Tom delivered tires and picked up tire casings for re-treading. It wasn't making them rich, but they were making ends meet.

Fannie suddenly heard the ruckus taking place somewhere up the hill behind her kitchen. Stepping out onto her back porch to look, she saw through the sparsely-green trees of springtime, flying shiny fragments of the big aluminum trailer, the base of which was just now coming to a stop about three hundred feet down from the highway. Oh, yes, and also, close to a hundred fast-moving objects. The wreck wasn't quite over, for her.

"Son of a bitch!" she cried, as she realized what she was seeing. "TOM!"

Tom and Harve hadn't heard what had happened nearly three hundred feet above them, and over the noise of the equipment. So when Fannie tore open the small door to the workshop, they had no idea what she was talking about, when she screamed, “There's bar'ls comin' down the hill!”

But as the men stepped to the door, they figured it out quickly when a sealed and very heavy blue-plastic barrel bounced over a big rock, cleared the roof of the tire shop and thudded hard onto Harve's vintage, carefully-restored Harley-Davidson that was parked in front, sending it sprawling. It was, actually, the only barrel that made it all the way down the hill.

“Son of a bitch!” cried Harve. “Son of a bitch!”

Andy had been hauling heavy-walled, sealed plastic barrels full of metal pellets, metallic elements used in alloying steel. His exit, more than a quarter of a mile back, would have quickly taken him to his destination at the local steel mill. But it had been a long drive and he'd denied himself much-needed rest. Coffee, he'd found, could only do so much.

Soon the hilltop hubbub began. Two ambulances, two firetrucks and an oversized wrecker came; but a big crane was eventually called in to extract the crumpled tractor. Andy was quickly freed. He probably could have walked out, but was carried back up the steep hill on a litter by four firemen and the litter was raised on ropes by several more volunteers, to the highway level. Traffic backed up for hours during the rescue and initial investigation, so eventually, it was re-routed along the now-secondary road that ran past Fannie's business. Of course, there were police cars, but they were all at the top of the hill, where the truck had left the highway.

It just wasn't big Harve's lucky day. Harve was ordinarily one of the good guys, a hard worker, a quiet man, and Tom's best friend. He was husky and powerfully built but a bit overweight, and he puffed and panted all the way up the steep hill and through the brush to get to the highway where police officers had gathered. But the closer Harve had gotten to the highway, the madder he had become. He had restored the big 1965 Harley Panhead himself, and at considerable expense, too. The paint had been brand new. Now it was all scuffed up and scarred, the pipes bashed and dented, and the gas tank was destroyed. Harve wanted blood.

So the cop he first approached didn't like Harve's attitude at all. Harve soon said something he would later regret, and the cop handed it right back the same way. Harve, with surprising speed and intent, swiped a big paw through the air and knocked off the officer's smoky-the-bear hat. Although he hadn't actually touched the officer, to the cops, it was assault, and Harve quickly found himself swarmed-under by angry police officers. Poor Harve would spend the next six months in the county lockup.

It will be necessary to do a stop-action for a few moments, to tell you something about Pennsylvania woodchucks. They aren't all like that overfed, domesticated Punxsutawney Phil, whose fat shadow supposedly prognosticates the arrival of spring each year. Almost all of the rest of the considerable woodchuck population are free, industrious, independent, adaptable and actually, pretty damned smart. They were in residence long before "Native Americans" appeared, and they stand an excellent chance of still being around when humans eventually disappear from the woodchucks' abode altogether.

Something every woodchuck knows by default, is that once he selects a territory and excavates his burrow, everything he can see from any point near its entrance, belongs to him. The fact that no one else seems to know that is not a concern, for he knows how to share. The strongest and most dominant of woodchucks will always select a location that includes a higher point of observation. It allows him to see further so that he owns more territory. All he can see is his kingdom, and his point of observation is his throne.

Jedediah was just such a woodchuck, although he hadn't actually been on his own for very long. He'd been born just the previous year, and so was very young and strong. As it was springtime, he had followed a well-traveled deer path along the hillside until he had come to an ideal place. There he had found the perfect, moss-covered stone outcropping, with a rounded, hollowed-out spot right on top that just fit his woodchuck behind. From this vantage point, Jedediah could see for miles. Overlooking a hollow, Jedediah owned a whole lot of woodland. There were houses, sure, and even roads here and there, but they didn't matter. What mattered was the plentiful browse, the brushy bittersweet vines, and a rich abundance of wild berries.

As Jedediah sat on his throne, to his left and hidden beneath the brush was a spring. The clear sweet water barely flowed from it, but it never stopped. The hillside was steep, but the leaf-covered soil was so thick that the water never quite reached the bottom of the hill. It soaked in instead, adding to the density of the tall trees and low forages that grew there. It was the ideal sort of water supply for a woodchuck.

Jedediah knew he would always live here. He would protect and defend this kingdom from anything, whatever it took.

The brave young woodchuck waited for all of the human traffic to clear away from his hillside, anxiously watching his precious rock throne from a safe distance. Everything would be alright, as long as his rock remained in place. The truck had approached from the south, so all of the action had taken place to the north of it. Jedediah had dug his main burrow just beneath the boulder with his contingency entrance about thirty feet to the south. But with all of the lights, noise and machinery, it was well past the fall of darkness before things got quiet enough for Jedediah to get back to his burrow. All that remained as evidence of a wreck was the fading odor of spilled diesel fuel, the telltale trackway of bludgeoned, broken trees that had saved Andy's life, and a lot of blue plastic barrels that had been declared harmless. Harve might have argued about that.

At the bottom of the hill, in the Wallace kitchen, Fannie was fit to be tied. She gestured angrily as she shouted to her son Tom. "Those sons-a'-bitches don't give a crap what happens to the people near their freakin' highway! There shoulda been a barrier up there! Who's gonna pay for Harve's Harley? Who's gonna help us get the work out, while Harve's sorry ass is in jail? I'm gettin' a lawyer!"

Tom didn't have a word to say. He knew better, at times like this. Fannie had been calm enough while his father had been alive, and while Tom was small. But his father was gone and Tom was all grown up. Probably his mother wouldn't hesitate to hit him with whatever was closest, when she was as mad as this. The only safe one in the room right now, was Scooter.

Scooter was Fannie's beloved Border Collie. After her husband died, Fannie realized she was a little too old and a little too busy to try and meet anyone else, to ease her loneliness and the ache in her heart. She remained miserable and alone for a few years, and her health began to decline. To Fannie, things looked a bit worse with each passing month. Then, an old friend brought her a puppy.

All of the loneliness and need that Fannie had inside was immediately unleashed on that poor pup. He'd gotten used to it, and even liked it, but mostly, he was an independent, happy-go-lucky cuss that almost anyone else at all would have hauled to the pound. He ate her rugs, he pooped on the back porch, he humped everything, inanimate or alive, like it or not. Fannie didn't care. He was her little sweetheart, her baby, and he could do no wrong at all.

While Fannie ranted, Scooter just laid at her feet and looked up at her, panting. He knew he wasn't in any danger. Tom, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get the hell out of the kitchen.

So the next morning, Fannie was standing outside the front door of a local attorney's office when it opened. Initial consultations had always been free, but that policy was changed within five minutes after Fannie left. Big John the lawyer had never seen anyone that angry, that vociferous or so determined. In the end, he advised Fannie of just two things: First, go see someone at the department of transportation's office in the capitol of Harrisburg, because you can't successfully sue before you have asked for a remedy, and have been turned down. Second, if you find you need one, select another attorney. John didn't want the case.

*******************

Jaime Alvarez had brought his family to the town nearest Jedediah's hillside to make a stand. Jaime was a laborer at the steel mill, where his mill co-workers had dubbed him just "Jose", because his Hispanic heritage simply made him "Jose" to all of them. He didn't really appreciate the stereotyping, but it was common here, and there really wasn't anything wrong with the name. So, he lived with that. Unfortunately, though, people here also treated Jaime as if he was an illegal, although he had emigrated legally to the United States.

Unbeknownst to the people he worked with, he was an educated man, a thirty-five-year-old geologist and petroleum engineer. Although most people don't think of Mexico as being oil-rich, it has substantial reserves, most of it undeveloped. But after having been pressed into the profession by his wealthy father, Jaime had finally had enough of cartel violence, enough of earthquakes, and enough of the heat and the adverse political scene. Concerned about Earth's environment, the climate and the part that burning fossil fuels plays in it, he had given up most of what he had and had taken his family on vacation to the U.S. But they had actually intended to stay and to apply for citizenship, which they did.

Of course, emigrating to the U.S. and opting not to utilize your education meant you had to take work wherever you found it. He'd worked for a farmer for a year and in a poultry processing plant for another six months. Jaime's wife complained that they'd had far more where they'd come from, so Jaime looked around until he found his current employment, at the steel mill.

Among the things he discovered was that he was now working in an very old factory that had been there nearly as long as the nation had been in existence. Close to the core of American industry, they manufactured steel forgings. They smelted scrap steel and alloyed the ingots until they had what was needed, then they cut and re-heated sections of the ingots before forging the shapes. Then the forgings were bored and machined in the big on-site shops.

When most of the other men came to work at the mill, that was about it. They had their lives, their hunting camps, their wives and children. Most of them had been born here and would die here. When Jaime arrived in the area, on the other hand, he understood immediately that the farm country was composed of fertile Hagerstown loam, that the underlying rock strata included iron-rich sandstone, and that below that there would be a web-work of limestone grottoes that held clean, clear aquifers.

Nevertheless, Jaime knew he wasn't that much different from the hard men with whom he now worked. He'd had to fight a couple of times, and he knew how to do that. Tough and strong, Jaime had held his own. Occasionally he'd joined the others at the nearby bar to have a couple of beers. One of them had invited him to join the local volunteer fire company, so he did; anything at all to fit in.

In fact what had impressed him most about this place was actually, the people. Jaime had believed that most Americans were rich and spoiled. This town was populated by strong people, hard-working men and women who were watching their government, just waiting for the other shoe to drop. If it did, the resistance would begin here, and in many other places just like it.

Jaime saw the article in the evening paper about the truck accident that had taken place that morning. He also read that the load had been bound for his place of employment. Sure enough, the next morning, a crew was assembled to collect the load that had been lost from the truck, and Jaime was assigned to it.

When the crew pulled up with trucks and a tailgate lift at the Wallace tire retreading shop, they met with a rude surprise. Because Fanny was still as mad as she had been earlier that morning, at the attorney's office. Nobody, but nobody was going to make a bigger mess of things at her place.

To Jaime, Fannie didn't look as mean and dangerous as she did to everyone else. She looked a bit like the mother he'd never known, and Jaime understood her anger. He stepped over to his foreman, who was both dumbfounded and annoyed, and asked for a few minutes to speak with the old woman.

"Go for it," he replied. Sure couldn't make her any madder, and he'd no idea what to do.

When Jaime stepped over to speak to Fannie, she was still yelling. Jaime took his hat off and looked right at Fannie. Immediately, she fell silent. Who was this guy?

In fact Jaime bore a resemblance to her late husband. He was olive-complected with black, curly hair and had a muscular build. There was also a kind look in his eyes. In a much softer tone of voice, Fannie asked, "What do you want?"

Jaime smiled, "Just to talk to you for a bit. I'm kinda in a tough spot!"

Fanny stared at him for a moment, and then decided that would be okay. "Come on in the shop," she said. "I'll get you a cup of coffee."

Eleven men stood outside in amazement as, through the open door to the shop, they watched Fanny, Jaime and Tom talking and laughing, drinking coffee and munching doughnuts. Ten minutes passed. Then Jaime got up and beckoned to his foreman. The foreman looked around at everyone else, and then walked to the shop door.

"All Miz Fannie wants," Jaime explained, "Is a little help." He explained briefly how the wreck had resulted in her employee being jailed, pointing to the damaged Harley. He also explained how the wreck had devastated her property and had damaged her business.

"I explained to her that the load is ours, but it wasn't our truck," Jaime related. "I explained to her it would cost a whole lot more to pull the heavy barrels up to the highway above, and there's no place to safely park up there. She's willing to let us bring the stuff down the hill, if we take some pictures of the damage for her and help her get her guy out of jail."

"Out of jail!?" The foreman bristled. "How the hell are we gonna do that? Know what they think of a guy who takes a swing at a cop?"

"Work release, man, relax! It's not for him. It's for her." Jaime grinned. He gently tugged on the foreman's sleeve, and pulled him outside. "There's one more thing, sir. I hope you won't mind."

"And that is?"

"Well she kinda likes me, and I told her it was my project to get the stuff off of the hill. She knows you're in charge, but, like, she thinks I am too."

"Hey, Jose, for all I care you can be in charge," he replied. "Tell her I'll talk to the judge. I know him. If you got any bright ideas how to get the barrels down here, tell me about it. Two men can't carry one, and we can't risk rolling them down."

Jaime took the foreman at his word and took charge. With Fannie's permission, the men cleared a path through the brush. Then they pulled a four-wheeled wagon that was owned by the tire shop to the base of the steepest part of the grade. With lines borrowed from the local fire company and an improvised system of pulleys, the barrels were easily moved from the base of the hill to the lower road, and loaded on the trucks.

This second day ended with new friendships in place. Fannie served coffee to the workers, and the job went smoothly. And Jaime, still known as Jose to everybody but Fannie and Tom, gained some new respect that would later lead to a promotion.

While barrels were being loaded on the wagon, Jaime caught a glimpse of Scooter, Fannie's Border Collie, trying to agitate a woodchuck near the top of the hill. Jedediah never moved from his throne, glaring down at Scooter as he darted back and forth, barking. "Cheeky little guy," he thought.

The next morning, Fannie was sitting outside the office of the chief engineer for the department of transportation. The man needed Jaime to help him to deal with Fannie, but of course he didn't know it. During a meeting she made impossible for him to avoid, he realized that he had a big problem that wasn't about to go away, even though he very much wanted it to. It would be easier by far to accede to her demands, to construct a barrier at the point where the truck had left the highway, to see that the trucking company's insurer gave her something for the many damaged trees, and also paid for damage to her employee's motorcycle. It was well outside of the bounds of his ordinary responsibilities, but Fannie was certainly not ordinary. So he promised her all of that, and then wiped his brow as she left.

That afternoon, he spoke with a representative of a primary engineering contractor, and he expressed all of the the angst that Fannie Wallace's anger had produced. “At this point, I don't give a damn what it costs,” he said. “I want something about three feet thick that will stop any truck from going down over that hill, ever again.”

The contractor mistakenly took the engineer at his word, and he set about designing a massive structure. Surveyors were sent to the site to determine what it would take. Once again, Jedediah the woodchuck had to endure some worry as the surveying crew tramped up and down over the bank, measuring and using transits to record the site data. The drop from the highway was vertical for about ten feet, then the hillside was very steep for a drop of another hundred feet. Jedediah knew something was wrong, he just knew it. And he was right.

Summer arrived. Harve was being transported to his job each morning via county van, and was grateful for the respite from his cell. Jaime was helping out at the tire shop too, in the evenings and on weekends as the workload permitted. Scooter met Jaime at his car whenever he arrived, joyfully humping his leg before he could even get all the way out of the car. At this point Jaime understood Scooter's status with Fannie, and he just pushed the dog away.

On a morning in late June, construction equipment appeared at the top of Jedediah's hillside. The highway had been reduced to a single lane to make room for the machinery. The contractor, the low bidder from a nearby city, was ready to go. Unfortunately, in bidding, the estimator hadn't really examined the blueprints, but had only scanned them briefly, calculating the cubic yards of concrete that would be required and the manpower needed to set forms, and to pour. The estimator was new, and hadn't noticed or considered the steel pilings that were to be driven, or the depth of the footings at the base. And so, an argument had erupted during which the new estimator had been dismissed. The engineer on the site now, was “damage control” for the contracting firm. He was looking for ways to get the job done within the bid value, in spite of the bad estimate. He had pulled more than one rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, and he'd never been caught.

Looking over the job site now, the engineer shook his head in amazement. All this spot needed, at the very maximum, were some h-beams set in concrete with a cable-net attached. And that would be overkill. He'd examined the blueprints after the fact, and realized that this much concrete would build a small bridge. Whose idea was it, anyway, for it to be three feet thick at the top? That much width at a height of six feet above the highway, as specified, with that drop-off required an overall height of nearly forty feet and a thickness at the base of more than twelve feet! As if that wasn't enough, the structure had a curved shape to follow the contour of the highway, and was more than sixty feet long!

In his quest for a cost-savings solution, the engineer clambered down over the bank using a rope tied to a truck bumper. Jedediah of course saw him coming and dropped quickly into his burrow. Even from below ground he could sense what the intruder was doing, as he looked all around, peered at the edge of the highway from below it, and stamped all over Jedediah's rock throne!

But the engineer had found what he was looking for. This outcropping was bedrock, and it was without a doubt deeply-seated beneath the highway. Why, you could park three chunks of concrete that size on this bedrock, and it would never move. He climbed back up the rope to have a word with the crew leader.

"Skip the pilings,” he said, “I'll sign off on it. I want footings on the north end only. The bedrock will support the rest. Let's get it done." Then he got into his pickup truck, dismissed it, and drove back to his office.

Seven weeks, many truckloads of concrete and quite a bit more than a quarter of a million dollars later, the job was finished. The trucks and the men pulled out for the last time and left a gleaming wall of new concrete, three feet thick at the top and more than twelve feet thick at the bottom. There were no pilings and also, there were no footings. The crew leader had reasoned that the berm of the highway had been overlapped by the concrete, and there was nowhere for it to go. Like the engineer, he had never been caught for slipping in a change.

Poor Jedediah was devastated. His throne was just buried by the outer wall of the concrete structure. He had watched from a distance in horror as the steel forms had been erected, and then the concrete was poured over a thin layer of gravel. His throne was gone. Perhaps even worse, his beautiful little spring had been ignored and covered up as if it wasn't even there.

So when the last truck pulled out, Jedediah went right to work. No matter what, his throne had to be in there. Without it, he wouldn't be able to live here. He dug a hole, right under the concrete wall.

Two more months passed. The wreck had occurred in mid-March, and it was now mid-September. Harve had just been released from jail and was on probation. He could finally go home after work. As a welcome-back surprise, Tom had found and had purchased a replacement fuel tank for the Harley, the two men had sanded and filled the scars and had prepped the big bike for repainting. Once that was done, Harve spent every evening after work detailing and airbrushing. The big motorcycle soon looked as good as it ever had.

Jedediah the woodchuck had never worked so hard. He'd found the outcropping that had been his throne, but he wasn't able to get on top of it. He certainly hadn't understood what concrete was and he didn't fully understand how it had gotten there. Of course no one had told him he was going to have to live with it being there, so of course he didn't know that. This huge thing, whatever it was, had to go! He worked hard to undermine it, by digging interconnected burrows everywhere. Jedediah generated small geysers of brown earth at every entrance, of which there were several dozen.

At one point, Jedediah had discovered the location of his little spring. When he had broken through to it, the backed-up water pressure had nearly blown him back out of the burrow. Now it was flowing freely, soaking into the earth and watering Jedediah's food supply once again. And as before, it was softening the earth, quite a bit.

About thirty years earlier, the steel mill had converted from its old steel-making process, which had produced an extremely large quantity of hard cinders. When the highway was built, the builders had helped themselves to the mountains of cinders that had been stockpiled near the mill. It was great fill that drained well and wouldn't compact easily. However, it also didn't bind together, like compacted shale or gravel would have. Ordinarily, that wouldn't have mattered.

However, where it had been used along the steep hillside, the berms that were left along the edge of the road weren't quite as strong, built on the cinder base. They would have been plenty adequate to support a big truck as it moved along the berm. A couple of hundred tons of concrete, well, not so much.

Keep in mind, too, that the whole structure had been built without pilings to secure it, without poured footings beneath it, and it stood nearly vertically along the hillside. Add to that, ground softened by an ever-flowing spring, and you've already got a problem.

And then, there was the industrious labor of a young and very determined woodchuck, undermining all of it. For two months.

Bridges are subjected to regular inspections, because traffic passes over them continually. But nobody inspects barriers. They just don't. If they had, it would have been noticed that the whole structure was listing to the north, where there was no outcropping of bedrock and the ground was soft. If an inspector had stood at either end of the structure and had eyeballed the length of it, it would have been obvious that it also had shifted from near-vertical to completely vertical. And he would have been very alarmed. But of course, no one did.

Jedediah had been burrowing industriously when the entire structure had dropped about four inches, all at once, on the north end. Jedediah worked furiously to free himself by digging deeper, and he managed to get out. Jedediah then eyed the dark clouds gathering overhead, and he knew it would rain. It was time to leave. So Jedediah retired to the shallow, temporary burrow he'd dug to the south end of the structure.

It was a cool Saturday morning in late September, following a night of rain. Fannie got up and patted Scooter, who was sacked out as usual on the foot of the bed. She got dressed and went downstairs, then pulled on her old sneakers and headed out to the shop to get a cup of coffee. The order list was full, so Tom and Harve were firing up the ovens and getting ready to run.

Harve carried the trash can outside to empty it into the dumpster, but came running back inside, his eyes wide. "LOOK!" he cried, gesturing wildly with both arms. "LOOOK!!"

Tom and Fannie hurried outside, just in time to see the entire concrete barrier making its second roll on its way down the hill. It was directly in line with Fannie's house. "Omigod! SCOOTER!" Fannie cried, and went running toward the house.

"MOM!!" Tom yelled, and he hustled off to stop her.

Each time the gargantuan chunk of concrete rolled once, it shook the earth. It rolled over and flopped, rolled over and flopped, nine times in all, snapping big trees like matchsticks and gaining momentum as it came. Tom grabbed Fannie and was dragging her backward, against her will.

The hillside was not as steep right behind the house, so that when the barrier finally stopped, it was with just one, last, slow, crushing, ground-shaking thud. The barrier that had been constructed to protect her property was now positioned just to the left of the center of her house. Beneath the barrier, the structure was crushed all the way to the foundation.

Before Fannie could find her voice to scream, Scooter stuck his head out of the crumpled window frame of the bedroom, which was in the less-damaged, nearer end of the house, and barked. "Arf!" He was wagging all over as if to say, "Let's do it again!"

Fannie stood there for a moment, absolutely dumfounded; then, she began to chuckle. Shortly she was belly-laughing like a crazy woman. But it wasn't a crazed or even a nervous laugh. Because Fannie knew she had both the state and the contractor right by their collective, well, you know. Her retirement was now secure and her puppy dog was okay, too. And she never really liked that old house anyway. Now she could have a brand new one.

Harve was sitting on the parking lot, his legs straight out in front of him, sobbing uncontrollably, his big arms over his head. The barrier had clipped a pole when it landed on the house, the wires had tugged on the pole next to it, and that pole had landed squarely on the Panhead, crushing the restored and repainted gas tank beyond any hope of repair.

Because of the yanked electric wires that were now flashing and burning, the fire company came. Jaime came with it. For a few minutes, the firemen just stood there and looked, speechless. Then one of them spoke. "Aye, caramba, hey Jose?"

"Fuck you," Jaime replied.

Fannie's flattened house with the massive highway barrier sitting on top of it would make the newswires and would be seen internationally. The contracting company would be directed to pay for all damages, which, to the owners, was not unmanageable. The damage control guy and the crew leader would both be looking for work. The replacement barrier, of h-beams set in concrete with a cable-net, would not interfere with Jedediah's throne or Jedediah's burrow or Jedediah's spring. And in fact, the new replacement barrier would never be hit by another truck.

High up on the hill, Jedediah sat on his throne of Pennsylvania limestone and viewed the destruction below with complete satisfaction. The concrete had not even knitted to this rock because it had been covered with moss. In fact, the covering of moss was still green.

Jedediah knew he would always live here. He would protect and defend this kingdom from anything, whatever it took.

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