EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I TURNED MY LITTLE RENTAL CAR north, back toward Pennsylvania and a day in the field with Fred Petridge and Nigel Iago. Even though I left Washington well ahead of the commuter traffic, it was hard on nine o’clock when I reached the Geologic Survey. I found Fred Petridge in front of the building, packing gear into a Jeep. A woman about my age stood beside him holding a big wicker picnic basket. It even had a checkered tablecloth folded over the top.
“Ah, Em, here you are,” said Petridge. “Slow down, catch your breath, Nigel isn’t here yet. If it was important to leave right at nine I would have told him eight-thirty. Meanwhile, I’d like you to meet Jenny Neumann, an expert on the local farms and a colleague from various volunteer efforts I’ve become involved in. You asked about the farm situation here in Lancaster, and Jenny had asked to come along on one of my field jaunts, so I’ve taken the liberty of putting the two together. She’s also interested in the limonite pseudomorphs I mentioned.”
Jenny and I exchanged pleasantries. She was an interesting sort: slim, athletic, and short-haired, with striking Germanic coloring and cheekbones. She was dressed in mixture of retro-hippie, drape-and-dangle stuff and practical farm gear. Her fingernails were a vivid purple, dotted with scarlet.
Fred put Jenny’s picnic hamper into the back of the Jeep and closed the tailgate. “I guess we’re all ready except for our resident warlock. Ah, there he is now.”
I turned to find Nigel Iago just skidding into the lot in a beat-up Austin Mini with Indiana license plates. He approximated fitting his vehicle into a
slot—rather missing the center of one pew and overlapping at a notable angle into the next—and sat for a moment, possibly meditating on having survived his transit. The door opened. He unfolded himself from the driver’s seat, put both hands against his spine, and leaned back, unkinking with an audible crunch. He leaned back into the car for a moment and rummaged around, producing a large black computer bag. Then, whistling the tune of a sea chantey, he headed toward us. “Morning, all!” he caroled, raking the sky with one wild, long-fingered hand. “Or at least, that’s what they call this overabundance of illumination, isn’t it?”
Nigel strode right past me and brought his frame to attention directly in front of Jenny. He took her right hand in both of his. “My heavens,” he said, his voice dropping into a purr, “Fred, who is this vision of feminine pulchritude?”
Fred rolled his eyes heavenward. “Get in the vehicle, Nigel, you’re late.”
I rushed for the shotgun seat. I wanted a good view of the day, and it was clear by Jenny’s blushing, smiling response to Nigel’s bromide that she and he were going to be looking more inward. Besides, I wouldn’t have wanted to give him the front seat and have him hurt his neck turning around to leer at her all day.
Nigel helped Jenny into the backseat, Fred gunned the motor, and we were off in a cloud of flying dung, as my mother used to say. We turned onto Highway 283 and headed southeast toward Lancaster.
Nigel crooned to Jenny in the backseat. “I have within my command—right here in this computer—all the soils maps, geologic maps, land ownership for this county, plus forty other layers of information.”
Jenny bestowed a smile on him. “Oh, you’re a GIS expert, right? Fred has told me
all
about you. He said how
useful
your expertise can be. I have
so
many projects that need
exactly
that kind of help!”
I fought back a snort. Our boy Nigel was in for a wild ride with this filly.
I heard Nigel unzip his satchel.
“Watch out with that zipper of yours,” Fred boomed.
“Wash out your mouth, Petridge,” Nigel growled appreciatively.
I glanced around at his laptop computer. It was a thick thing, obviously jam-packed with bells and whistles and lots and lots of firepower. Nigel began tapping commands into its keyboard. He said, “How may I prove my devotion to you, O my lovely?”
Jenny replied, “Give me the entire holdings in this county for one farming family. Show me the influence of the geology on the lands and the productivity of the farms.”
I was liking Jenny more and more.
“Give me a name,” said Nigel.
“Oh!” said Jenny. “There are so many I’m interested in.”
“How about ‘Krehbeil’?” I said.
Jenny’s head popped forward between the seats and she fixed a round-eyed stare on me. “You know the Krehbeils?”
Oh shit!
I thought.
She knows them! I should have guessed that! Even in this humid land of tiny farm footprints, most of the farmholders will know each other
. Obfuscating as best I could, I said, “In fact, I don’t know the Krehbeils. I’d never even been in this county until Sunday. But I was driving around Monday and happened to go by their house. Mrs. Krehbeil was on the front porch in a wheelchair. She fell out of it, so I stopped to help her. I stayed for a bit and helped her daughter get her resettled.”
“Was she all right?” Jenny asked anxiously.
“Apparently … although I’m a bit concerned,” I said, seeing a way to turn my gaffe into a route toward gaining information. Perhaps Jenny knew something damning about the family, and I could phone Faye and tell her, and that would be that. “I mean, I don’t even know these people, but it seems as if that old lady ought to be in a hospital, or a care home, where they have the equipment and staff to care for her.”
“I’ve had the same concern,” she said.
Nigel interjected, “Krehbeil. Spell that name?”
Jenny said, “K-R-E-H-B-E-I-L. That’s one of the farms I’ve been telling you about, Fred. They’ve applied for an easement, but they’re not on the preferred soil types, so each year I can’t seem to get the Ag Board to give them a high enough rating to qualify for purchase.”
Nigel said, “I thought that would be with a
C
.”
“It’s an old Mennonite name,” Jenny said, returning to the backseat. “Many have Anglicized it into C-R-A-Y-B-I-L-E, but this family is out-Pennsylvania-Dutching the Pennsylvania Dutch.”
“So then it’s a Dutch name?” Nigel inquired.
Jenny leaned back out of sight again and said, “No. ‘Dutch’ is in this case a corruption of ‘Deutsche.’ They’re all just as German as I am.”
“Getting back to that Ag easement stuff,” I said. “What’s all that mean?”
Jenny shifted the volume and tone of her voice into something appropriate for a public lecture. “The encroachment of subdivisions threatens farms like the Krehbeils have. These farms have been in the families for generations, so it’s not just a loss of open space, it’s the loss of the heritage of small farmholders. The care given to the production of crops and dairy is not the same in the big agribusiness spreads in the flatlands of states out west. If the farms of Lancaster County die, a way of life dies with them.”
I said, “You’re selling rocks to a geologist. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming, and we’re seeing the same kind of problem out there.”
Jenny’s face popped into view again. “Oh, really? I’m very interested to hear what it’s like out there. Your acreages are larger, right?”
“Well, I don’t know what they are here, but it takes up to fifty acres a head out west, so a viable cow/calf operation is say, six or eight square miles.”
“Square
miles
?” roared Nigel. “Hell, woman, back here in God’s country, a whole
farm
is fifty acres!”
Jenny said, “That’s because here we get forty inches of rain a year. We’re raising crops and dairy on the best nonirrigated cropland in the nation. Back where Em comes from, you can’t even raise hay without added water. You get what, twelve inches a year?”
“In a good year. We’ve been having drought lately.” It was painful to say “we.” It was my mother alone, or with the occasional hired hand, who had endured this latest catastrophe.
“I’ve about got it all here on my screen … .” said Nigel.
Jenny was not yet done with her stump speech. “The Krehbeils do not want to sell out to a subdivision, but neither can they afford to remain on the land the way they’re going. They need cash influx, and there are two programs here in Lancaster County—one county-based, one private—that have funds to purchase their development easements. The programs purchase development rights from the farms, paying cash for the gap between the farming value and the development value of the land, allowing the farms to cash in on the rise in values while simultaneously preserving the tracts for agriculture. The value of those easements is equal to the value of the land as developable land minus the value as farmland. It can be huge. And even if the Krehbeils were able to afford to keep farming
while all the other farms around them are subdivided into housing tracts, the infrastructure of farm-supply stores will fold up and move away, or just fold altogether. And as developments move in, the value of the land soars, and with it, the taxes. If nothing is done, Deirdre will lose the farm just because she couldn’t make enough to cover annual costs.”
I said, “You say Deirdre will lose the farm. Does it belong to her?” I tried to recall what Mrs. Krehbeil had told me. My impression was that it belonged to her.
Jenny said, “No, it belongs to her mother, who obviously can’t farm it anymore, and who, in fact, never did. She was a debutante who married for the life in town. Deirdre told me that they used to lived in Philadelphia, where her father had an art gallery, all very upper-crust, and this farm belonged to his mother. And much as Deirdre likes to think herself a farmer, she has little or no business sense. As I was telling Fred, the soil is not the best. And it’s more complicated than that. Deirdre’s father applied for the Ag easement before he died, but the application is still pending. If her mother dies before it goes through, then any one of the heirs can step in and jam the gears by saying ‘no way.’”
“How many heirs are there?” I asked, wishing I could take notes without seeming conspicuously interested.
“Four,” said Jenny, “if I recall accurately from my notes. There’s Deirdre, the eldest; then William Krehbeil the Third; then another son named Hector; and then a second daughter named … I’m not sure what her name is. Everyone calls her Cricket.”
“So you’ve met all these people?” I asked.
“No. Just Deirdre. And I forgot; Deirdre has two grown kids, Anthony and Cynthia, who live there on the farm, although, unless they’re mentioned in the will, they don’t count as heirs, I don’t think.”
“Why does it matter what the soil type is?” Nigel asked, trying to insert himself back into the conversation.
Fred said, “That’s where your eye-in-the-sky GIS system needs to take a tour of terra firma, Nigel, old pal. It’s no joke that Lancaster County has the best farmland in the country, but not the whole county. When the German farmers moved to the U.S., they sent scouts ahead to find the best soils, and the scouts knew to look for limestone. That soil had wonderful, thick, rich soil profiles. Of course, when the pioneers cut down all the chestnut trees that were growing here at the time, a lot of that topsoil
washed right down into the creeks, but we’ll skip over that part of the heritage story.”
“Fred …” said Jenny impatiently.
Fred told Nigel, “Open your damned computer up to a general view of the county’s geology, hotshot. You’ll see parallel bands of rock types cutting across from east to west. The Conestoga limestone sits right smack in the middle. Flat to shallow slopes, and all that lime to enrich the soil. No need to irrigate. The Germans gobbled it up. Parallel to that to the north, you have several other limestones and dolomites; some have steeper slopes, locally. Along the north edge of the county, you have sandstones and shales, some quite steep, and nowhere near as fertile. To the south, you have granites and gneiss, less desirable yet. Way down in the southernmost bit of the county, you have the Peters Creek schist all riddled with serpentine barrens. No way you’re going to make a farm out of that.”
Here I cut in. “Where are the chromite mines?” I inquired.
Fred said, “They’re down there in the barrens. We’ll go there later today. Just the sort of field location Nigel would adore. They don’t call it the barrens for nothing.”
“Oh, Gawd,” Nigel moaned. “That means ticks, I suppose.”
Fred cackled. “Big as hubcaps. But first we’re running over to Manheim Township to look at the limonite pseudomorphs, right, Jenny?”
Jenny sighed. “Actually, Fred, they paved them over yesterday.”
“What!”
I turned and looked back over the seat toward Jenny. She had folded her arms across her chest as if she were cold, and was staring out the window.
“But we had an agreement that they were going to leave that land open!” Fred howled.
“I know, Fred. I’m disappointed, too.”
“Disappointed? How about outraged!”
“Now, Fred …”
“Jenny, is that some kind of Mennonite thing? How in hell’s name do you keep your cool?”
“It’s not about cool. It’s about saving my fire for a fight I can win.”
I cut in again. “What’s the story here?”