Page 61 of Last Seen
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,
canto IV, verse 178
Friday
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 Schrödinger’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.
