Empty Mile

Webb, the man whose name was on the business card Rolf Kortekas had given me. We passed a couple of doors as we made our way to the rear of the building. They had frosted glass panels in their upper halves and the light that came through them made me think there was no one in the rooms behind them.

The door at the end of the corridor was the same as the others except that the blurred nimbus of an electric light showed through the frosting. We knocked and went in.

Howard Webb was a small man with dark hair. He sat behind a wooden desk that looked like it had been thrown away by the local school years ago. There were windows behind him and it was bright in the room, but still he had a lamp burning on his desk. It was angled over a spread of black-and-white photographs. At his direction Stan and I dragged two hard chairs away from a wall and as we set them in front of his desk I saw that the photographs he was looking at had been taken from a plane. We made our introductions and he reached over the desk and shook our hands. Stan coughed nervously when it was his turn. Howard Webb leaned back in his chair.

“You’re lucky to catch me. This office is mainly an administrative station-permits for land use, that sort of thing. I’m only really here when there’s a survey in the area. You said on the phone that you have a picture you want me to look at?”

I handed him my father’s aerial photograph. “I was wondering what you could tell us about it.”

He looked at the picture for a moment, then set it down and typed the serial number in its bottom right-hand corner into a laptop that stood on a small table beside the desk. He read the screen for a moment then turned back to us.

“It’s a place outside Oakridge. We did an aerial survey of the area a year ago. How’d you come across it?”

Stan shifted in his seat. “Uh-oh, Johnny.”

Howard Webb glanced at him uncertainly. “There’s nothing wrong with you having it. I just meant that they don’t really find their way out into the world with any sort of prevalence…” His voice tailed off on the last word, as though he was uncertain Stan would understand its meaning.

Stan looked embarrassed and said quietly, “My dad had it.”

“Oh. Was he developing land in the area?”

“He was a real estate agent.”

Howard Webb frowned and looked at the photo again. Then he turned it over and read out what was written there. “The trees are different…” He repeated it to himself and smiled. “I remember this picture. Your father sold real estate in Oakridge. Yes, I remember him. We met at his office back in the middle of April when I was researching the area. He asked me if I had any photos he could have for his office. And I remember particularly because, a few days after I’d given him some, he asked me exactly that-why the trees were different.” Howard Webb looked at me and squinted. “How is he?”

“Well, we’re not really sure right now. He may be off on a midlife crisis.”

The surveyor was momentarily confused, but evidently decided it would be indelicate to probe further. “Oh, well, he seemed like a nice man. Do you know what he meant, about the trees?”

“I can see something in the photo, but I’m not sure what it is.”

“Okay, look here.”

Stan and I stood up and leaned over the desk as Webb pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil.

“So, most of what you can see is typical topography for the area-forest, river, a collapsed spur. But there’s something else a little more interesting here too. The trees we’re talking about are here.”

Webb traced the faintly differentiated channel of trees on the picture with his pencil.

“You can see how this area of forest appears very slightly lighter on the photograph. That’s because the vegetation here-the trees-is less dense and of lesser stature than the forest on either side of it. And it’s like that because it’s growing in ground that is poorer in nutrients. You see the course of the river? How it curves around this spur? That’s not its original course. I think what we’re looking at here is the result of a landslip. At some point the face of the spur fell away into the path of the river and forced it into this curve, here. The line of sparser vegetation on the other side of the bluff follows the original path of the river. The trees are, in effect, growing on top of the original riverbed. In some cases a riverbed will be sediment rich and we would see the opposite effect on vegetation-that it would grow more strongly-but in others the riverbed is composed of gravel and sand and plants have a harder time because they only have a shallow layer of topsoil from which to source nutrients. That’s probably the case here.”

“But we own that land and where those trees are doesn’t look like a riverbed. I mean, it doesn’t dip down or anything.”

“The Swallow River is very shallow in that part of the country even now. There’s no reason to suppose it was any deeper along this old, original stretch. The slip might have happened several hundred years ago. Over that time whatever depression there was could easily have been filled with windborne debris, matter washed in by rain, accumulated dead vegetation…”

Stan made two quick popping noises with his lips. “Yikes, Johnny, a secret river and we didn’t even know it was there!”

Howard Webb looked slightly nonplussed, but recovered quickly and smiled at Stan. “A lot of these things are only visible from the air.”

I had what I needed. Stan and I thanked Howard Webb for his time and headed out of the office. At the door, though, something occurred to me and I turned back to him.

“When my father was here asking about the picture, was there anyone else with him?”

“Yes, a kind of redheaded guy, about your age.”

On the way home Stan was agog with the idea of a hidden river.

“I bet we’re the only people in the whole world who know about it, Johnny. It’s right there, in the trees, and anyone else would just walk over it, but we know. I told you it was weird how the trees were like that. And I was right.”

“That you were, dude.”

“I wonder what it would look like if we dug it up.” For a moment he was silent, then he startled me with a sharp intake of breath. “Johnny! That must be why Dad dug those holes there. Where he got that sample from. The hidden river must be full of gold!”

“Calm down, dude.”

“But why would he dig samples if he didn’t think it was? Hey, you know what? We should go exploring there.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be exploring it all right.”

“We should make an equipment list. Like a flashlight and an axe. And some rope.”

“What are you going to use rope for?”

“You coil it up and put it over your shoulder. So it goes across your chest.”

“And you look totally cool.”

“Yeah. We gotta do it when Rosie’s around so she can see.” After that he gazed out the window for a couple of minutes, then he turned back to me and said quietly, “You think we should get married, Johnny?”

“Can’t, we’re brothers.”

“Me and Rosie, stupid.”

That Stan and Rosie might get married was an idea so bizarre I’d never contemplated it and caught unawares as I was now I couldn’t help but react negatively.

“I don’t know, Stan, Marla and I aren’t married.”

“Yeah, but Johnny,” Stan looked uncomfortable, “you’re you.”

“Okay, even so, do you think it’s a good idea? I mean, Rosie’s a lovely girl but I think she had a pretty rough life in the past. Being married is kind of different than just going out, you have to deal with more of each other’s problems.”

“But Rosie and I don’t have problems. We’re happy.”

“Yeah, but what I’m saying is you might have problems if you got married.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Johnny.”

“Look, Stan, I know you love her, but you live right next door, you see her whenever you want. What’s the difference?”