A Rambler’s Lease

Every autumn, the town sends Bradford Torrey a tax bill—and he is grateful to know someone still remembers him. This year, his share of the public expenses is seventy-three cents.

In late-19th-century New England, Torrey’s woodland is both a modest real-estate holding and a private kingdom of winding paths, acorns, and familiar pines. He welcomes the tax that makes him a “landed proprietor,” but wishes the town would leave its crooked roads—and their wild, beautiful borders—alone. His deeper worry waits among the trees: the pines he has grown fond of may fall to the axe as soon as he is gone. As he wanders through a thicket fighting its way back to life, Torrey wonders where his ownership ends and nature’s begins. What, after all, does it mean to call a piece of earth your own?

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