The House on the Loop

Walter Hendricks kept a workshop out behind his place near Harrisburg, three apple trees, and a view of the Susquehanna his father used to call "the one thing nobody can take from you." When the people from the state transportation department showed up that February with an offer to buy the land for a new highway loop, he was sitting by the woodstove peeling an apple in one long curl, the way he'd done it his whole life.

They offered him $340,000. On top of that, a unit in an apartment complex on the edge of town, second floor, balcony facing the parking lot, elevator that worked maybe half the time.

"For the house I was born in?" he said, and let the peel drop onto the tablecloth.

The man from the department, young, a folder tucked under his arm, said something about eminent domain, about the route already being approved, about how it affected the neighbors down the road too, and that it'd be easier for everyone if they settled this the friendly way. Walter offered him coffee. The man turned it down. Walter showed him the door.

He refused to sign. Not out of anger, really — more the sense that whatever number they'd typed up had nothing to do with what that house actually meant. His neighbor Donna, two lots over, signed within a week and moved in with her daughter out in Carlisle. Walter stayed put.

Construction kept going. The excavators rolled in that spring, and month after month the loop curved around his property like a river bending around a boulder — wide at first, then tighter and tighter, because the engineers had to save money and couldn't afford to route the road any farther out. Eventually both lanes met up again behind his garden, and Walter Hendricks's house ended up stranded on an island between two streams of asphalt, hemmed in by guardrails like a cage.

From the kitchen window now he could watch traffic heading toward Philadelphia one way and freight trucks rolling toward Pittsburgh the other. At night the headlights swept across his bedroom ceiling on a steady rhythm, like a lighthouse. Dust settled so thick on the apple trees that one August he couldn't even tell if the fruit was red or gray until he hosed it down.

His grandson Dylan, eleven at the time, stopped going out to the yard. "Grandpa, you can't play ball out here, it's like living at an airport," he said once at dinner, and Walter didn't answer, just topped off the boy's soup.

His wife Carol handled the noise worse than he did. She stopped sleeping, started taking pills her doctor hadn't even prescribed before, and one winter night, after a truck braked so hard it rattled the windows, she said into the dark, quietly: "Walt, we should've taken it." He didn't say anything back. He lay there listening to another car pass the fence at a distance he once couldn't have hit with a thrown rock.

People from nearby towns started snapping photos of the house from their cars as they drove by. Someone posted it online, and suddenly "the house in the middle of the highway" was getting written up in papers as far off as Philadelphia. Reporters came out. One of them, a kid from the local paper still in work boots, asked if he regretted it.

"If I'd known back then," Walter told him, pointing toward the road, "I'd have taken the money the very first day."

It dragged on another four years. Carol's heart gave out — the doctor said the noise and the constant stress hadn't helped, though he wouldn't call it the only cause. Walter drove her to checkups at the hospital in Harrisburg, and every time, the route took them past a billboard advertising new townhomes going up near their old property — right where you could once have walked from their yard in ten minutes flat.

Finally, that spring, at sixty-seven, he called the transportation department himself. An office, a wooden desk, the same yellowed contract they'd once tried to get him to sign — except now the date was crossed out and rewritten by hand.

"What would it go for today?" he asked.

The clerk, a different one this time, explained matter-of-factly that land values out there had dropped since then, since nobody wanted to live boxed in by a highway on every side. They offered him $240,000. A hundred thousand less than the first offer.

He signed that same day. He took his copy of the contract home in a folder that used to belong to Carol — she'd passed the year before, that spring, before they'd ever managed to arrange the move — and that night pulled out a box of old photos from the place: himself, young, standing by the apple trees; Carol with a cake on Dylan's birthday, back before the loop was even a line on a map.

He moved into the apartment in town, the same one they'd offered him years ago, just for a different price this time. They paved over the house on the island along with the rest of the loop — a stretch of asphalt now sits where his front door used to be. Dylan, twenty now, helped him unpack the boxes and set up two planter boxes on the balcony.

"What do you want to put in these, Grandpa?"

Walter looked down at the parking lot below, quiet in a way his old kitchen hadn't been in years.

"Won't fit an apple tree down there," he said. "Let's do peppers."