Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...proud of his family. The Pitts had been mountain men in the Ramapos since Revolutionary War days, and they claimed to be direct descendants of famed William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. "This Lord Pitt," they liked to boast, "he was lord of all England." The Pitts and the Starrs and the Conklins were the aristocrats of the hills...
...auto came along and the state put paved highways through the Ramapos. Soon the woods were full of artists, Boy Scouts, welfare workers, summer cottages. A mountain man couldn't sing a ballad to himself, like "If life was a thing that money could buy, The rich would live and the poor would die," without somebody pouncing on it as something wonderful that was 500 years old and came straight from England...
...other mountain men drifted down into the valleys, the hamlets and small towns. Some of them even went to work on eight-hour-a-day jobs. But not Gil Pitt. He just moved higher up on Half Moon Mountain, four miles from the nearest town, two miles from the nearest highway...
...Maggie discouraged strangers from coming up the mountain. They came down only to vote the straight Republican ticket, to pick up supplies and to get their old-age pension checks. The checks were one modern convenience to which Gil had no objection. With them, he and Maggie got along fine until the winter of 1946. Then they fell sick, almost froze to death, and were taken by a rescue party to a hospital at Suffern. When they got well, they were sent to the Rockland County poor farm...
When the men came to carry his body down the mountain, Maggie Gannon stood in the doorway of the shack and sobbed. "I looked for the dogwood to pull him through," she said. "I didn't look for it to take...