PASSAGE ONE

(1)People who live in Taylorstown have made their choices: scenery over shopping, deer over drive-throughs. The historic enclave, although not untouched by the building boom that exploded in Loudoun County before so dramatically going bust, remains largely rural, with all the benefits and inconveniences that entails.

(2)“It’s far from everything,” Tara Linhardt, president of the Taylorstown Community Association, said with a smile. The bluegrass musician has lived in Taylorstown since she was a child in the 1970s. Clearly, she views its remoteness as an asset.

(3)Taylorstown wasn’t always out of the way. In the 19th century, it was one of the busiest and most heavily populated areas of Loudoun, thanks to milling, mining and agriculture. Its population dwindled, however, when mining and milling became history. Taylorstown now is unincorporated, with the county divvying up its residents among the surrounding jurisdictions of Lovettsville, Waterford, Lucketts and Lees-burg. Officialdom aside, the locals consider themselves residents of Taylorstown if they live within about a three-mile radius of an old store at the junction of Taylorstown and Loyalty roads.

(4)The store, shuttered in 1998, is a passionate cause in Taylorstown. A nonprofit group with grassroots backing is spearheading its reopening as a “’very green” business and recently installed a new system. But the day that the store will again be able to sell bread and local produce “won’t come anytime soon,” said Anne Larson, an artist and long-time Taylorstown resident.

(5)It’s a matter of money, of course, and the store’s boosters are pursuing grants. Meanwhile, the store hosts occasional community gatherings, such as craft fairs and lectures on topics of area interest such as Lyme disease. Lyme disease, carried by deer ticks, is perhaps Taylorstown’s No. 1 problem. “Deer are so comfortable here,” Linhardt said, “that most people have had it twice.”

(6)Richard Brown, a Quaker, founded Taylorstown in the 1730s when he built a mill on the banks of Catoctin Creek near where the store is now. Although Brown’s mill is long gone, the surrounding area has been designated a historic district and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976. It is the site of two of the oldest stone houses in the county, Hunting Hill and Foxton Cottage, as well as a mill later built by town namesake Thomas Taylor.

(7)The three-mile radius that extends from the store now encompasses about 1,500 households, said Tami Carlow, vice president of the Taylorstown Community Association. These households sit on land that is alternately rolling and open or steep and wooded.

(8)A good number of the oldest structures got their start as “patent houses,” explained historian and Taylorstown resident Rich Gillespie. In colonial times, construction of a 16-by-20-foot cabin was a requirement for obtaining a patent or land grant.

(9)Taylorstown owes much of its pastoral beauty to its still-abundant farms. On a summer day along Loyalty Road — named in honor of Taylorstown’s Unionist sympathies during the Civil War — fields are dense with green corn or punctuated by round bales of hay waiting to be collected. Placidly grazing cattle and horses are everywhere.

(10)These days, Taylorstown’s farms come in both the working and gentleman’s varieties, and Ken Loewinger’s 175-acre Glenwood is both. Loewinger rims a small horse-boarding operation, but he also works full time in Washington as a real estate lawyer.

(11)“I couldn’t afford to have this in Great Falls,” Loewinger said, gesturing toward a rambling red barn, rolling pastures and a large stone house that grew out of a 1750s log cabin, possibly a patent house.

(12)The D.C.-born Loewinger initially worried about whether the country would be a good fit. Loudoun County didn’t even have a synagogue when he and his wife, Margaret Krol, moved to Taylorstown in 1991. They attended religious services in a bingo parlor. Now, the county has two synagogues, Loewinger said, and he has found the country to be “a richer environment than the city.”

(13)Luda and John Eichelberger would agree. The husband-and-wife volcanologists moved into a log house a five-minute walk from the Taylorstown Store late last year. Eichelberger, who works at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, met his Russian wife while doing fieldwork on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

(14)A profession that involves close observation of remote mountains requires a love of the outdoors, and in Taylorstown the Eichelbergers indulge that love with running and biking. One of their favorite trails loops along Catoctin Creek, where deer browse nonchalantly beneath pawpaw trees and a great blue heron feels at home enough to stand on a boulder and do its dead-on impression of a statue.

(15)Luda Eichelberger, who volunteers at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, said she has “never lived so close with animals.” The frogs are her particular favorite. They “sing like birds,” she said.

(16)Five years ago, Leslie McElroy and Richard Jones relocated from a less-distant locale — elsewhere in the Washington suburbs — but they profess equal enthusiasm about life on their 10-acre Taylorstown farm. Like Eichelberger, McElroy works for the Geological Survey in Reston; Jones, an estimator for a commercial construction company, commutes 120 miles round trip to Prince George’s County. The two have spent much of their free time during the past three years adding 1,600 square feet to their 800-square-foot house.

(17)The project is about done — “finally,” McElroy said. With its completion, she and Jones, who own five horses, plan to make better use of the bridle trails that honeycomb their area. They also will have more time to harness Kallai, their 2,000-pound Percheron mare, to a cart and wheel along neighboring roads. That kind of outing isn’t possible in many places that are within driving distance of the District.

(18)“This is the last little bit of truly rural, affordable Loudoun County,” McElroy said.

PASSAGE TWO

(1)We keep an eye out for wonders, my daughter and I, every morning as we walk down our farm lane to meet the school bus. And wherever we find them, they reflect the magic of water: a spider web drooping with dew like a necklace. A rain-colored heron rising from the creek bank. One astonishing morning, we had a visitation of frogs. Dozens of them hurtled up from the grass ahead of our feet, launching themselves, white-bellied, in bouncing arcs, as if we’d been caught in a downpour of amphibians. It seemed to mark the dawning of some new watery age. On another day we met a snapping turtle in his olive drab armor. Normally this is a pond-locked creature, but some ambition had moved him onto our gravel lane, using the rainy week as a passport from our farm to somewhere else.

(2)The little, nameless creek tumbling through our hollow holds us in bondage. Before we came to southern Appalachia, we lived for years in Arizona, where a permanent brook of that size would merit a nature preserve. In the Grand Canyon State, every license plate reminded us that water changes the face of the land, splitting open rock desert like a peach, leaving mile-deep gashes of infinite hue. Cities there function like space stations, importing every ounce of fresh water from distant rivers. But such is the human inclination to take water as a birthright that public fountains still may bubble in Arizona’s town squares and farmers there raise thirsty crops. Retirees from rainier climates irrigate green lawns that impersonate the grasslands they left behind. The truth encroaches on all the fantasies, though, when desert residents wait months between rains, watching cacti tighten their belts and roadrunners skirmish over precious beads from a dripping garden faucet. Water is life. It’s the salty stock of our origins, the pounding circulatory system of the world. It makes up two-thirds of our bodies, just like the map of the world; our vital fluids are saline, like the ocean. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

(3)Even while we take Mother Water for granted, humans understand in our bones that she is the boss. We stake our civilizations on the coasts and mighty rivers. Our deepest dread is the threat of having too little moisture — or too much. We’ve lately raised the Earth’s average temperature by 0.74°C, a number that sounds inconsequential. But these words do not: flood, drought, hurricane, rising sea levels, bursting levees. Water is the visible face of climate and, therefore, climate change. Shifting rain patterns flood some regions and dry up others as nature demonstrates a grave physics lesson: Hot air holds more water molecules than cold.

(4)The results are in plain sight along beaten coasts from Louisiana to the Philippines as super-wanned air above the ocean brews superstorms, the likes of which we have never known. In arid places the same physics amplify evaporation and drought, visible in the dust-dry farms of the Murray-Darling River Basin in Australia. On top of the Himalaya, glaciers whose melt water sustains vast populations are dwindling. The snapping turtle I met on my lane may have been looking for higher ground. Last summer brought us a string of floods that left tomatoes spoilt on the vine and our farmers needing disaster relief for the third consecutive year. The past decade has brought us more extreme storms than ever before, of the kind that dump many inches in a day, laying down crops and utility poles and great sodden oaks whose roots cannot find purchase in the saturated ground. The word “disaster” seems to mock us. After enough repetitions of shocking weather, we can’t remain indefinitely shocked.

(5)How can the world shift beneath our feet? All we know is founded on its rhythms: Water will flow from the snowcapped mountains, rain and sun will arrive in their proper seasons. Humans first formed our tongues around language, surely, for the purpose of explaining these constants to our children. What should we tell them now? That “reliable” has been rained out, or died of thirst? When the Earth seems to raise its own voice to the pitch of a gale, have we the ears to listen?

(6)A world away from my damp hollow, the Bajo Piura Valley is a great bowl of the driest Holocene sands I’ve ever gotten in my shoes. Stretching from coastal, northwestern Peru into southern Ecuador, the 14,000-square-mile Piura Desert is home to many endemic forms of thorny life. Profiles of this eco-region describe it as dry to drier, and Bajo Piura on its southern edge is what anyone would call driest. Between January and March it might get close to an inch of rain, depending on the whims of El Nino, my driver explained as we bumped over the dry bed of the Rio Piura, “but in some years, nothing at all.” For hours we passed through white-crusted fields and then into eye-burning valleys beyond the limits of endurance for anything but sparse stands of the deep-rooted Prosopis pallida, arguably nature’s most arid-adapted tree. And remarkably, some scattered families of Homo sapiens.

(7)They are economic refugees, looking for land that costs nothing. In Bajo Piura they find it, although living there has other costs, and fragile drylands pay their own price too, as people exacerbate desertification by cutting anything living for firewood. What brought me there, as a journalist, was an innovative reforestation project. Peruvian conservationists, partnered with the NGO Heifer International, were guiding the population into herding goats, which eat the protein-rich pods of the native mesquite and disperse its seeds over the desert. In the shade of a stick shelter, a young mother set her dented pot on a dung-fed fire and showed how she curdles goat’s milk into white cheese. But milking goats is hard to work into her schedule when she, and every other woman she knows, must walk about eight hours a day to collect water.

PASSAGE THREE

(1)Ultimo Vargas had been in Hatch, New Mexico, only six months, since March, and already he owned his own business to compete with Netflix, delivering DVDs and video games to ranchers and people who lived within 20 miles of town. He had worked out a deal with Senora Gaspar, who owned the video store, to pay him 90 percent of the delivery fee, and if he took out more than 50 videos in a week, a premium on the extras.

(2) Ultimo had a lightweight motorized bicycle, which made it feasible. Gas prices were high, and delivery and pickup saved customers money. Also, it was convenient — they didn’t have to wait till they had an errand in town. Most of the customers were Mexican families who worked the land for Anglos, or Anglos who owned cattle or pecan groves. Ultimo organized his schedule to avoid random trips. It was a lot of riding, but he liked the terrain — the low hills, the bare mountains, pale blue in the day and shadowed in the evenings, the vast sky. He liked seeing the fields of onions and chiles, the pecan trees, the alfalfa growing, the cattle grazing. He saw hawks, antelope, badgers, and deer, and learned their habits.

(3)In a few weeks he knew most of his customers — the Gallegos family out on Castaneda Road, who grew green chiles, the Brubakers farther on, the widow woman, Sefiora Obregon, who still ran the Bar SW ranch. The Michaels family was a mile east, the Garcias were on the other side of Interstate 25 — they owned the bakery — and Tom Martinez lived in the trailer a mile past. Many of the families grew chiles — that’s what Hatch was famous for — and marketed them to the co-op in Albuquerque or along the town highway, pickled or fresh, in jellies or as ristras. Everyone knew Ultimo, too, the chico loco on his moped.

(4)The more people knew him, of course, the more people knew about his business. He was strong, had a good smile, and was a natural salesman. He talked to the Mexican families in Spanish, asked where their relatives came from, who was left in Hermosillo or Juarez or Oaxaca. He talked to the Anglos to improve his English and to show he was a serious businessman. He expected great things of himself one day.

(5)Ultimo’s English was passable, because he’d worked almost a year in Deming before he came to Hatch. He’d washed dishes at Si Senorita from six to two, and at four he mopped floors at the elementary school. In between he spent his off hours at the Broken Spoke, where he met people, even some women, like Brenda, who was a hairdresser, then unemployed. At eleven one night Ultimo was walking home to his trailer, and Brenda stopped in her Trans Am with the muffler dragging. She gave him a ride, and one thing led to another. After a month, Brenda wanted to get married — she was pregnant, she said — and Ultimo said why not. Two weeks after the wedding, he found out there was no baby, and Brenda ran off to California with a wine salesman.

(6)To pay off Brenda’s debts, Ultimo used his meager savings and took a third job unloading freight at the train yard, though he still wasn’t making enough money, or sleeping enough, either. One evening, after Ultimo was threatened with eviction from Brenda’s apartment, his boss at the school found him dozing at a teacher’s desk, and he was finished in Deming. He walked north with his thumb out, but no one picked him up. In two days, 46 miles later, with nothing but the clothes he wore and a blanket he’d brought from home, he staggered past Las Uvas Dairy and a few broken-down houses and into Hatch, where he saw a HELP WANTED sign in the window of the Frontera Mercado. He went in and got a job stocking groceries.

(7)Hatch was in the fertile Cottonwood corridor along the banks of the Rio Grande River, with the interstate to the east and open country in every other direction — ranches, pasture, rangeland. The days were getting warmer by then, and he slept in the brush along the river, shaved and washed himself there, and ate for breakfast whatever he had scavenged from the mercado the day before. If he wasn’t working, he spent sunny mornings in the park and rainy ones in the library. Then Senora Gaspar hired him to work the morning shift at the video store, checking in rentals, cleaning, replenishing the stock of candy bars and popcorn. He established a more efficient check-in, organized a better window display, and built a new sign from construction waste: Gaspar’s Movies.

(8) “What delivery?” Senora Gaspar asked.

(9) “Our delivery,” Ultimo said. “I have bought a moped from Tom Martinez.”

(10)Some of his customers ordered movies for the company Ultimo gave them. Senora Obregon, 55 years old, had lost her husband and wanted someone to talk to. She reminded Ultimo of his grandmother in Mexico, and he often made the ranch his last stop of the evening so he had time to sit on her porch and listen to her stories. Her husband had been killed two winters before, when, as he was feeding the cattle in a blizzard, a 1,500-pound bull slipped on a patch of ice and crushed him. They’d lost 100 head in that storm. Her children were in Wichita, Denver, and Salt Lake City, two sons and a daughter, and none of them wanted anything to do with the ranch. When he visited, Senora Obregon dressed well, as if Ulti-mo’s presence meant something, and she offered him steak and potatoes, and always leftovers to take with him afterward.

PASSAGE ONE

PASSAGE TWO

PASSAGE THREE