Page 36 of Last Seen

Chapter Twenty-Four

The last of the sun breaks through the trees, shining its meager light on a woman’s bare legs. She is not moving. Asleep? Dead? We do not know yet. But welcome. Welcome at last to our little town.

This land she lies upon was cleared two decades earlier to accommodate the town of Brockville, but the dense forest still surrounds it on all four sides, and this is where she’s managed to disappear.

It is thick with trees and wildlife, and she is vulnerable.

Or was. Maybe she is still. Don’t be distracted by something so banal.

Instead, let’s look down the mountain toward the valley below.

This declivity is man made, though you wouldn’t know it without the town’s history in your hand.

Oh, you have one? A beautiful brochure, isn’t it?

The village nestles by the river on the western edge, which is used for irrigation and fishing, and a retention pond has been built in the very center with a large fountain delineating it as the town square.

This overlays an expansive geothermal heating and cooling system for the homes, and a solar farm on the eastern slope provides energy to the whole town. Who knows what might be hidden inside.

Yes, our little town has grown into quite the showstopper. People don’t move away once they’ve gotten in. They stay until they die.

That’s been happening a bit more lately. Recall our woman on the mountain. We’ll get back to her shortly, but while this place is meant to be nirvana, there are always cracks. Perfection can’t exist, not when there are men to destroy it.

So how did this utopia come into being? Settle in, and I’ll tell you a story.

Brockville is named for the Brockton family. At the head of the board’s twenty-foot reclaimed barnwood table, you will find a man named Miles Brockton. Yes, that Miles Brockton. You don’t know who he is? Wow. Thought everyone did.

Miles is famous—infamous really—and not just for his biophilic-planning expertise. Yes, people come here from around the world to learn how to create their own villages. But it’s more than the practical; they want to rub elbows with the man who is known as a modern-day Thoreau.

Why am I telling you this? You thought you’d already read it all?

You have no idea what you’ve missed. You need to understand where we are now.

We need to go into the darker recesses of this little town off the map, where people don’t leave unless they die, where women go missing and no one seems to notice, where Miles gets richer and richer and richer.

Ironic for a man who has eschewed the societal norms, who defies convention, who publicly celebrates and privately vilifies the bourgeois who populate his own world.

What do I know about Miles that isn’t in the literature?

That’s an excellent question. You’re paying attention. Bravo. It’s an interesting story. Yes, of course you have time.

Miles had a normal life until he started butting heads with his father.

Yes, that old saw. The prodigal son, the controlling father.

A story repeated over time immemorial. The son rebels, eschews his father’s wishes, and either fails or succeeds.

Our Miles succeeded. He had no choice. He simply couldn’t handle his father’s incessant demands for him (especially when he found out there was a dirty little secret the family had been hiding).

He soon saw his father not only as a nuisance but as a hypocrite, as well. That was the end for them.

Always beguiled by stories of isolation and self-exile, Miles left and spent the next several years off the grid. He graduated college, sold all his belongings, drove west ... and disappeared.

This was 1960. It wasn’t typical for people to tune out yet. Always a man ahead of his time, our Miles.

His parents were terribly upset; they’d been hard on him growing up and regretted that.

He had a sister, MaryEmily, but they weren’t close until he was gone and she realized how much she missed him.

It was MaryEmily who convinced their parents to look for Miles.

After a few years of nothing—no proof of life or death—she grew despondent, and, convinced at last something was awry, they hired a private investigative firm.

There were sightings. In New Mexico and California. In Washington State and Montana. The PI managed to map out a trail that crisscrossed much of the western US and Alaska, with dips into Mexico and Canada, and then to the wilderness of Maine, and then ... nothing.

Two years later, it was widely assumed the wild frontier had killed Miles dead.

A bear. Starvation. Exposure. Something nefarious.

He’d been gone for five years at this point.

MaryEmily graduated from Sweet Briar and married, had a child of her own.

Her parents passed, one after the other, barely a year separating them.

She didn’t learn the secret. Not until much later.

Three years: Articles were written.

Five years: A book.

Seven: A movie made.

Miles Brockton was the great American mystery. He was Schrodinger’s cat, living in a state of suspended animation, neither here nor gone. Dead or alive, he’d vanished.

And just when MaryEmily’s heart had grown tissue over the scar of her brother’s loss, he appeared. Walked out of the Maine wilderness healthy and well.

It was the land that sustained him, he claimed. He’d come to the forest, and it had sheltered him. He’d eaten only what he could catch or grow, and it had nourished him. He forgave his father his foibles, but it was too late to tell him so.

That last caused some emotional upheaval, as you can imagine.

The feelings were too much, so to the land he decided to return. But this time, he had people. Followers. Acolytes. Disciples.

He was thirty-one when he marched back into the wilderness with nineteen hearty young souls, excited to create a new world.

He returned five years later, alone but for a barely breathing infant son wrapped in his coat, raving, raging with fever and nonsensical stories.

It was a virus that got them, he claimed. In the wilderness, without proper medical care and subzero temperatures, things fell apart quickly. Not many people were like Miles. He’d seen the abyss, gazed into it, and laughed. But it killed lesser people.

That failure was enough to turn people away from his cause. You might wonder if anyone ever thought to charge him with some form of negligent homicide, but they didn’t. Apparently, you aren’t fully responsible for other people’s stupidity.

But our Miles was not deterred. He wanted to go off grid again. He wanted people to be with him in this desire. And this time, he didn’t want to lose his flock. Once was a tragedy. Twice? A disaster, and someone might take umbrage.

So using his own ingenious skills for living in the wild, Miles Brockton took that Columbia-educated mind and put it to work on creating a real self-sustaining community.

He scouted a spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the border of Tennessee and Virginia that fit all his needs.

The cold could kill; the heat, too, but the nearness of a few bigger cities meant no one had to die.

It would take money, of course, to buy the land, and not surprisingly, he had very little of it: his parents had left a small inheritance, but much of it had been lost on the years of MaryEmily’s relentless private investigations.

So Miles got creative and got sponsors. Investors. Venture capital. After all, he was living proof the land would give what they needed.

He traveled the world learning more sustainable ways of living off the land, and two years later, when he was ready to try again, when memories were dampened, the money appeared.

A lawyer, too, attached to his hip, who claimed that Miles had rights to his own story and was due royalties from both the successful book and movie ventures. And a judge agreed.

Important people love this sort of story. The Buffetts and Templetons and Soroses of the late seventies ate this shit up.

Suddenly, Miles had plenty of income, and he put it to good use.

He bought up the ten thousand acres of deserted valley in the Blue Ridge he’d found and created an oasis in the woods.

The building of Brockville, so aptly named, was as environmentally friendly as he could manage.

As few trees felled as possible, the contours of the land defining the contours of the town.

The state forced utilities on him in the early nineties, when it was clear that he would generate a wealth of tax income for them.

So he leaned in and decided to define it as a conservation resort town.

A biophilic dream. And a decidedly lucrative one.

Seems his second foray into the woods also cured him of his desire to be poor.

Live off the land, yes, but do it from the lap of luxury.

During all this, he married Sonia Whitley, the young widow of his dear friend and first investor, Carl Whitley. Carl’s death was so perfectly timed. No whispers there. At least none to Miles’s face.

They had a passel of children, and they all worked the land alongside him, learning how to live without access to modern amenities, stores.

Hearty boys with strong backs and malleable minds to help a man, feral, free-range children who were educated by the earth and sun in the old ways, and a wife who wanted nothing more than to raise her family well.

And the people came. They flocked to Miles’s side.

People who wanted to escape the real world and live in this utopia of their own creation fought for a coveted spot.

His investors were the first families of Brockville, of course.

They wanted to escape their lives, too, and Miles always had been a visionary.

That was forty years ago.

Now, Miles is staring down the barrel of his last years, and Brockville is a modern mecca to the world of biophilia.

Now, people come to Miles for instruction.

No one remembers those failed ventures, not in the face of this level of success.

No one remembers the nineteen people he lost. Any sort of history can be rewritten.

In the face of glory, Miles’s own past was remade, a phoenix from the ashes.

Brockville is everything he always dreamed of.

He is sharing the earth’s bounty with the followers of sustainable living, and his people are happy. So very happy.

He disappears on occasion, still. Overwhelmed by the people who want and need him, he hauls his aging body into the woods to live in the silence. And it is his sons who make Brockville run. His sons who carry on the legacy of independent spirit.

And other legacies. Darker legacies. But let’s not talk about that yet.

Their mother, well, she wasn’t as enamored of the Brockton family ethos as she should have been.

It’s a badly kept secret. Before she died, Sonia didn’t need much vodka to share that she thought her husband was a bit of a maniac.

Who goes into the wilderness alone and doesn’t come out a little off?

No one can blame him. All geniuses are mad.

They have to be. They are the Cassandras, and with such foresight comes a sense of dislocation from reality.

Is this why the woman in the first frame is alone in the forest, possibly dead? Is this one of Miles’s people, lost in the Maine tundra to a virus? Or is she one of the women who clamor to attend the artists’ colony, to come paint and draw and write on the grounds of the Brockville Retreat?

Hmm. Neither? Both? Could she perhaps be someone who has stuck her nose in too deeply, who thought to take advantage of the town’s unique mentality? Or someone who happened along at exactly the wrong time?

Let me get my shovel, and then we’ll find out.