The new place was mostly forested, with tall, good-sized trees. There were about 5 acres in pasture at the most, and the bulk of that was growing over with young jack pine seedlings. The grassy part of the pasture was studded with huge, blackened stumps, reminders of the fire of 1910 that had wiped out most of the truly large trees in northern Idaho. The land stretched up the mountainside, so that when you went to the top and looked down, you could see the river, and beyond it. There was a simple farmhouse with three bedrooms, a good kitchen, a livingroom, and best of all, electricity and hot running water. There was a little bitty log cabin decaying into the ground; it was in even worse shape than the one we'd just left. There was also a garage/workshop which was promptly filled with Dad's stuff, except for the lumber which we would eventually move several times from place to place. This time around, Sarah and I wound up sharing a bedroom. Raphah moved into the smallest bedroom, and Rachel got what was originally a sunroom, while Mom and Dad got the master bedroom. The old lady who'd owned this place before us must have loved plants. There were bleeding hearts in the back, peonies in the front, and a glorious silver poplar spreading generous branches at the front corner of the house.

The logging started right away, and I wept to see the beautiful hillside stripped of its trees. The loggers never left any nice trees. They were selective all right, selecting what they wanted and leaving everything small or scrawny or misshapen, along with a huge mess and deep scars in the earth. Dad had quit the paper route now, and was turning into a timber buyer. This involved a lot of his favorite activity: talking on the phone, trying to convince people of his point of view. Which was, namely, that they should log their land so it would "look like a park" and make some extra money on the side. I thought about our place. It didn't look anything like a park to me. It looked raped and disrespected. I hated what they had done.

I took the check my father had mailed to me and hid it. The mattesses for my bed were elevated not by a bed frame but by milk crates stacked at each corner. I stored things in the crates, things like shoes I wasn't wearing at the time. When I thought no one was looking, I put the check deep into the toe of the shoe I was least likely to wear, and put that shoe at the bottom of the pile of shoes in the crate, stacked another full crate on top of it, and replaced them in their supporting position at the corner of the bed.

Within a few weeks, the check was gone. They had found it, cashed it illegally, and put my money towards the down payment on the land. I was told that I would be compensated with a portion of the land. How on earth did they find it? They must have ransacked the entire room and then carefully put it all back together.