My town was washed from the map forever when I was just a little girl.
I lived in a little farming town at the bottom of a valley. Round Valley was its name. The soil here was some of the most fertile in the state. Before the Dutch and English colonized and settled, the Lenape tribe lived and farmed here. Once I was big enough, I got to help with the the farm, keeping up the tradition. I would tie up my curly blonde hair into a ponytail and put on my overalls like any of the boys in the valley. I enjoyed working the land and caring for livestock. I likely would have gotten my children into farming too, had things not happened as they did. But bad things that would destroy the legacy of this town and its future were already in motion.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the bad things began when the man in the tan suit came knocking at my grandpa’s door. We were eating breakfast together, my mom, my grandpa, and my little brother, Noah. My mom had brought us to live with my grandpa after my father was killed in a farming accident two years earlier. My grandpa often had visitors over, but we weren’t expecting anyone at this hour. It was early to hear someone come knocking. It was faint enough that I thought I had imagined it. They knocked again, too loud to ignore this time, interrupting the ticking grandfather clock nearby.
“Who that? Who that?” Noah asked. He kicked his legs under the table as he crunched on a piece of buttered toast. His wide blue eyes stared at our grandpa expectantly. Grandpa had already gotten up from the table and put his jacket on.
He shuffled toward the door, slippers against wood, and when he looked out the window a deep scowl was etched into his face. His back was turned toward us. Grandpa was always smiling. It showed off the dimples I had inherited from him. He very rarely frowned. It was even rarer to see him scowl.
“Government,” he muttered, as he gestured for my mother to join him. I was confused as to why he needed my mother there with him to greet a visitor. We were a close knit town. Everyone knew everyone. My mother quickly collected herself and dabbed her lips with a napkin before rising to follow him.
After they were both outside, I scarfed down what remained of my eggs and toast, swallowing so roughly it hurt my throat. My mother wouldn’t be happy if I got up from the table without finishing my food. She also wouldn’t be happy if she found out I was eavesdropping, but I didn’t consider that as I ran toward the front door. I briefly peeked my head up toward the window. My mom and grandpa had their backs to me but I could see the stranger whose face was long and gaunt like a starving horse. I leaned down to press my ear to the wooden door.
“Anne?” Noah’s voice called out from the table.
I shushed him, furrowing my brows as I tried to listen.
“What doing?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full!” I said, mirroring the many times my mother had shouted that phrase at me. Noah went quiet and seemed to focus on his eggs. I immediately felt bad for shouting, but I wanted to hear what was being said outside.
An unfamiliar voice, presumably the voice of the starving horse man, spoke up.
“Mr. Howell, my name is Mr. Jefferson. I’ve come on behalf of the state of New Jersey to appraise your property,” The man said seriously.
I’d never heard anyone call my grandpa Mr. Howell before. Usually, it was just grandpa or dad or Jim.
My grandpa scoffed, “We ain’t selling nothing.”
“You don’t have a say in the matter.”
“No say?” I heard my mother gasp.
“You must sell your crops, your property, and your livestock to the state. Anything you don’t sell will be seized by eminent domain.”
I didn’t know what those words meant at the time – eminent domain – but I heard my grandpa throw out some cuss words in response. I never heard him get angry like that before. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to hear anymore.
I ran back to the table and got back in my seat, staring at the crumbs on my empty plate.
In the coming months, there were a lot of protests and meetings in our little town in the valley. In truth, the protests had been happening long before the starving horse man showed up on our doorstep, but now they had ballooned in size and intensity. Like circling turkey vultures, the news folks had come to watch and report as soon as things in town reached a boiling point. The townsfolk were angry and the news folk were wanting to pick our brains like carrion birds picked at roadkill. There had been a vote – that’s what the anger and frustration was about – a vote about Round Valley. Protests were held all along the single dirt road for months on end. People chanted and yelled and held signs. SAVE OUR TOWN, said one sign. NO DAM, said another. Mrs. Johnson, our closest neighbor, talked passionately about how she had been born in the living room of her farm house in the valley. She talked about the inhumanity of being forced away. Even my grandfather spoke with a bullhorn in hand about how he had inherited his home from his father and his father’s father and so on. He talked about how his wife, my grandmother, was buried under the crooked cedar tree in the backyard. I hadn’t seen my mother cry like this since our father was killed. My father was buried close to that tree too, after all. Even Mr. Wright, a notoriously crotchety and aloof older man had come out to join the protests. Usually he just sat on the rocking chair on his front porch grimacing at us kids and would do so ‘till his dying day.’
Apparently lots of men in suits had come into Round Valley to buy our properties to force us to leave. I didn’t understand how the state could force anyone. I didn’t understand the vote yet, or how everyone had voted against us or why. This was our home.
“It’s for a res – warh,” Jacob Meier had said to me when he and I and the other kids were sitting outside town hall while the adults shouted.
“For a what?”
“A res – warh,” He repeated with a roll of his eyes, fiddling with his overalls as he spoke. “They’re gonna kick us out and flood the valley like it’s a big bowl because the state is running out of water. Remember when things were all dry a while ago? That’s what Pa said. Too many people, not enough water.”
“Why do they gotta flood us? Can’t they build it somewhere else? I don’t wanna get kicked out,” I said, looking away and up toward the lip of the valley. “It’s not fair.”
Jacob shook his head and shrugged. Just this once he didn’t have all the answers.
“I hear some people ain’t leaving no matter what they tell us.” Spoke up another little girl, Beth Klein. “If we all just stay, what are they gonna do? They can’t kick us all out.” Beth always liked to throw tantrums. When Beth wanted to stay put somewhere she would writhe and yell like a piglet having a seizure. Maybe if we all screamed and thrashed like Beth, they wouldn’t be able to take us all out of the valley. Maybe Beth was on to something.
That night I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare. I imagined sitting in my bedroom playing with my dolls as a tidal wave loomed overhead just outside my window. I could almost smell the sea salt. It was the same smell as the few times my mom had taken Noah and me down to the shore. The wave stretched upward and blotted out the sun as it slowly moved toward me. I couldn’t move. Then – all at once – the wave that scratched the sky thunderously crashed down on top of the house. Water filled my vision and my lungs. My dolls floated away from me.
From that point on, I didn’t think it would be a good idea to stay unless I suddenly figured out how to grow gills. It still wasn’t fair, though. I didn’t want to leave. No one did.
I hated the government. I hated anyone who voted for this. I hated that we were being removed from our roots like unwanted trees cut down and ripped out. The state needed water, and they were going to use our valley to store that water. We couldn’t fight it. Although many had talked a lot of talk about staying put, only one or two farmers actually intended to dig their heels in and keep fighting. One of them was Mr. Wright. Most other people gave in eventually.
I went one afternoon with my grandpa to an auction where all the farmers were selling their livestock. It felt more like walking into a funeral than an auction. I heard the squeals of pigs and bleats of sheep all my life; this time they sounded sad too.
Unlike the livestock, he and any of the other farmers who sold their houses were able to buy them back. The state wanted the land, not the houses. But even with the house bought back it was our responsibility to get it out of Round Valley before our town was filled with water. There was a street overlooking the valley that was empty and waiting for the houses to be placed on it. It was such a new street that it didn’t even have a name yet. That’s where everyone’s houses who wanted to move would go.
The cozy little town had turned alien to me. Some houses were boarded up, others were already being lifted up onto massive flatbeds, and several were bulldozed entirely. Trees that had held tire swings were chopped down, memories were being cut down in the name of progress. I thought of my grandmother and father under the cedar tree and wondered what would happen when it came time to cut it down.
The single dirt road that was the only way in and out of the valley wasn’t wide enough or sturdy enough for the bulldozers hauling houses uphill. The Meiers hired someone cheap to try and pull their house out of the valley. The whole town gasped in collective horror when the bulldozer slipped and the house fell off and cracked in half. I think I saw Mrs. Meier throw up. Further progress moving out the houses was slowed until a new road could be put in.
Crime had never been a problem in our town before, but now, every hour, cops patrolled around the houses lifted up onto flatbeds. After one of the houses had a window smashed out and things stolen, there was a fear that more outsiders would be drawn to town to try and loot. I cried seeing our house hauled up off the ground. I was afraid it would crack in half like the Meiers’ house. I didn’t know which was scarier – staying here and waiting to drown, or watching my house shatter into splinters. I kept glancing from the house to where I knew my father was buried.
“What about dad?” I asked my mom.
“What about dad?” I repeated.
My mom just looked away from me.
It was expensive to dig up and move graves. They hadn’t moved the graves of the Lenape when they were forced out. Now the graves of our family would remain here too.
As all this was happening, I still had to go to school in one of the neighboring towns instead. I hated how the other kids gawked at me. It was worse when the adults looked at me with pity. I was mostly annoyed by how the other kids would pepper me with questions.
“Is it true your town is going under water?”
“How are you getting your house uphill?”
“Will you miss it?”
I already did miss it. I was infuriated. The town I had loved and grown up in was being torn apart. Turned into a wasteland. Whole families were being cast to the four winds.
My anger and hate only grew with each lesson that we had to sit through. In school we learned about how the government was supposed to help and protect the people. I felt abandoned by our government and trampled upon. Hurt and betrayed. I stood up in class and told the teacher as much in an outburst of emotion. I said, “The government doesn’t care about nobody!” Then I dropped one of those cuss words grandpa said to the starving horse man.
That was the first time I had ever been put in the corner with a dunce cap.
After class when I returned to my mother and grandfather, they weren’t even angry with me for getting into trouble.
When it was finally time to pull our house up the hill, I wasn’t sure I could muster up the will to watch. If our house slipped and broke into pieces, my heart would too. Grandpa’s home had been a place of solace after my father died. To see it destroyed would surely destroy me.
My mother’s gaze was teary and anxious as she clutched her handkerchief. Even as the sun set and cast its red-orange light over our slow moving house, she didn’t take her eyes off it. My grandpa put a reassuring hand on her back. Even Noah, who knew the house the least amount of time as any of us, was nervous and fidgeting.
By nightfall our house crested over the hill and was driven to the new plot of land. It was a small plot, not big enough for a farm. There were already a handful of other houses on the street that had been hauled up here before ours. It felt too close together and cramped.
When I entered grandpa’s house on the nameless street, it felt different even though physically it was the same structure. There was a slight tilt to the house now. I realized some time later that the ground here was uneven unlike the ground in Round Valley. I felt off balance.
The house was familiar, and I was grateful that we had been able to save it, but I struggled to stay there. I thought about my father, my grandmother, our family buried down there in the valley and us up here.
I watched Mr. Wright kicking and writhing in black and white one evening. All I could think of was Beth Klein as the police dragged him away. It was less like a seizing pig this time. More like death throes. Even the longest lasting holdouts had been forced to leave by now.
I found any excuse I could to stay out of the house.
School was one such convenient excuse, but on the weekends I felt lost, untethered from the world around me. Oddly, I found myself drawn back to the valley. I would sit at the top of the hill and watch them drive houses up or bulldoze anything that remained. From a distance, it looked like a bunch of ants at work. I felt as though I could reach out and squash them between my thumb and forefinger if I squinted just right.
There was no going back. Maybe a part of me thought that by watching everything be destroyed would be like seeing the body of a dead loved one. I would be able to accept things and move on if I could see the corpse of Round Valley before it was flooded. It didn’t work like that. Soon the land in the valley was flattened completely.
That’s when the dams began construction, and they brought in the pipes. Water was being pumped in by the gallons. It would take years to fill the valley completely. I kept imagining my father underwater. He looked scared but maybe it was my own reflection in the rising water.
Around the same time the towns that had wanted the reservoir’s water for their citizens began to back out. I didn’t know why – I really still don’t – but they did. Sure, other towns would get to use the water, but the bigger towns and cities that had lobbied so hard for our town to be uprooted and drowned now backed out of it.
The water kept rising. I couldn’t stand watching it anymore.
I had to adapt to my new life at the top of the hill. Noah had already begun to forget Round Valley. Sometimes, I wished I was that lucky. Other times, I felt it was a blessing that our town still lived on in my memory at least. Many of the kids I had grown up with in the valley ended up moving away with their families.
Years had passed since the man in the tan suit first came to our door. I was older now. Jaded. The grimace my grandfather wore when the government came to the farmhouse was mirrored frequently on my own face. I remained angry, but I tried to heal. We all did. My mother tried to get my grandfather into farming. It was a pitiful parcel of land to plant on in our new backyard, but he managed some tomatoes and strawberries. It kept him busy.
A year and half after the reservoir was completely filled in 1960, my grandpa had a heart attack and passed away. I think it was a broken heart. I felt like my heart was being torn apart every time I thought of our town, so I could only imagine how he felt. He had been born and raised there. Worked the land by hand. Raised his own children there. Sustained himself there.
My mom was broken-hearted about our town too, of course, but she kept her emotions in check. She didn’t want to seem hysterical in front of us kids, I guess. It wouldn’t have seemed hysterical to me, though. We all mourned the lost town as though it was a family member. Losing the town, my father, and my grandpa all carried the same amount of hurt for me.
My mother, Noah, and I stayed in the house for many years. Noah eventually went off to college, but I stayed by my mother’s side. After she had a stroke and couldn’t care for herself any longer, I became her caregiver. Watching her waste away reminded me of the slow rise of the water in the reservoir. After my mom died I inherited our house on the hill.
Eventually, I found a love of my own. I raised my children here. Now they bring their children to visit. None of them know anything about farming. My grandchildren ask me questions about the reservoir as they sit on the floor by the ticking grandfather clock. I’m as old now as my grandfather was when the government came knocking on his door. The kids these days think Round Valley is haunted. The Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey. They think I’ll tell them ghost stories about it.
The stories I tell them are much scarier, full of monsters worse than ghosts.
“My town was washed from the map forever when I was just a little girl…”