My name is Connor Wells and I was twenty-three years old, three weeks post-eviction, and in possession of thirty-eight dollars and a beagle named Biscuit when I bought twenty-nine acres of abandoned Christmas tree farm in the North Carolina High Country outside Boone.
The eviction was, in the technical legal sense, my fault. The lease had specified no pets. I had a pet. The pet was a six-year-old beagle named Biscuit who had one ear that had been chewed on by a larger dog at some point before I adopted him and who had, in three years of cohabitation, developed opinions about nearly everything and expressed them with the specific confidence of a dog who has decided he is a full participant in any situation he finds himself in.
I had been willing to negotiate on many things in my life.
I was not willing to negotiate on Biscuit.
The landlord had been within his rights. I did not dispute this. I packed my belongings and Biscuit’s belongings — his bed, his bowl, his three chewed tennis balls, the specific brand of food he ate and no other — and moved to my sister Meg’s couch in Asheville.
Meg was twenty-six, patient by nature, and had made clear that the arrangement was temporary while also making clear that Biscuit was welcome indefinitely, which told me what I needed to know about her priorities.
I found the listing on a Wednesday evening.
Parcel 5A. Twenty-nine acres of mountain agricultural land in Watauga County, North Carolina, outside Boone. One-room cabin, approximate 1960s construction, condition derelict. No electrical service. No water service. Well on property, condition unknown. Christmas tree cultivation — Fraser fir, last commercial harvest approximately eight years prior, current stand unmanaged. Stone outbuildings — one storage structure. Delinquent taxes: seven thousand two hundred dollars, assumed by purchaser. Opening bid: thirty-eight dollars.
I showed Meg.
She read it.
She looked at Biscuit, who was asleep on her couch with his chewed ear folded over his face.
She looked back at me.
“You got evicted because of that dog,” she said.
“I know.”
“And now you want to buy land.”
“Land where nobody can make me get rid of him.”
She studied me.
“The cabin is described as derelict,” she said.
“Most things worth fixing are described that way first.”
“Boone gets significant snow.”
“Fraser firs are cold-hardy.”
“Cole—”
“Meg. Twenty-nine acres of Fraser firs that have been growing for eight years without anyone cutting them. Do you know what an eight-year-old Fraser fir goes for at Christmas? Do you know what twenty-nine acres of them represents?”
She didn’t.
I told her.
She was quiet for a moment.
“When’s the auction?” she said.
The auction was the following Friday in Boone. Meg drove. I wore my least-worn flannel shirt. Biscuit waited in the car, which he accepted with the dignified patience of a dog who has learned that some situations require waiting.
Parcel 5A was the last item of the afternoon.
The auctioneer described it without enthusiasm. Twenty-nine acres. Derelict cabin. No utilities. Seven thousand in taxes. Eight years since last harvest. Opening bid thirty-eight dollars.
I raised my hand.
“Any advance?”
The room was quiet.
“Sold.”
Meg drove us to the property that afternoon. The access was a gravel track off a county road that climbed through a stand of hardwood before opening onto the farm — and the farm, when it came into view, stopped both of us.
Twenty-nine acres of Fraser firs covering a High Country slope in the October light — not the tidy rows of an active Christmas tree operation but something wilder and more substantial, eight years of unmanaged growth that had taken trees that would have been harvested at four or five feet and allowed them to become seven, eight, nine, ten feet tall. The rows were still there, still visible, running up the slope in the parallel lines of something that had been planted with intention even if the intention had been interrupted.
Biscuit, when Meg opened his door, put his nose into the mountain air and inhaled with the comprehensive attention of a dog taking inventory.
Then he jumped down and walked to the gravel track and looked up the slope and looked back at me.
“I know,” I told him.
“He does seem to like it,” Meg said.
“He likes Fraser firs. He has taste.”
The cabin was at the top of the slope, a twenty-minute hike through trees that brushed our shoulders and smelled like Christmas. It was small — one room, perhaps sixteen by twenty feet, with a stone fireplace that took up most of the south wall and a sleeping loft above and a porch that was mostly intact and faced the slope and the view.
The roof had a section that had been repaired at some point with a tarp weighted down by stones — a repair that had held for several years based on its weathered appearance and that would need addressing before winter.
But the walls were stone — dry-stacked fieldstone that had been there since the 1960s and would be there for another century. The fireplace drew. The floor was sound.
Biscuit sat in front of the door with the expression of a dog who has found what he was looking for.
“He likes it,” I said.
“Biscuit liked the dumpster behind the Thai place,” Meg said.
“He has broad taste.”
Meg stayed the first weekend. We slept in sleeping bags on the cabin floor, which was cold in the way that stone floors in mountain October are cold, and woke to a High Country morning that had frost on the grass and mist in the fir rows and the specific silence of a place that has been waiting a long time for someone to come back to it.
The work that followed was the specific work of reclaiming a place that has been left — clearing, assessing, repairing in the sequence that makes structural sense, learning the property. I fixed the roof with materials from a lumber yard in Boone whose owner, a man named Gerald, had twenty years of High Country building knowledge and shared it freely when he understood what I was attempting.
Gerald also told me, over a coffee at his counter, what he knew about Fraser fir market value — which confirmed what I had told Meg and exceeded it. Eight-year-old Fraser firs of the height and density I had were premium product. I had twenty-nine acres of them. The timing, relative to the Christmas market, was not coincidental — they were ready.
The well needed a new pump, which I installed with a YouTube education and two trips to the hardware store. The power was a longer project — I ran an extension from a small generator initially and began the process of getting the property connected to the grid, which Watauga County Electric handled over six weeks.
Six weeks in, Meg came for a weekend.
We were clearing the overgrowth from behind the cabin — brambles and volunteer growth that had accumulated against the old stone outbuilding on the north side — when Biscuit, who had been investigating the base of the stone wall with the systematic focus of a beagle who has detected something, began digging.
Beagles dig with purpose.
Twenty minutes of watching him convinced both of us that the purpose was real.
We helped.
Eighteen inches down, at the base of the stone wall where it met the slope, Biscuit’s nose found what his paws had been after — a metal canister, the kind used for storing documents, sealed with a rubber gasket that had preserved the interior against the mountain moisture.
Inside the canister was money and a letter.
The money was thirty-nine thousand dollars — banded hundreds that had been wrapped in oilskin inside the canister, dry and intact.
The letter was written on three sheets of yellow legal paper in the handwriting of someone who wrote slowly and deliberately.
The writer’s name, at the bottom, was James Whitaker.
He wrote that he had planted the first Fraser firs in 1971 and had farmed the property for thirty years, alone after his wife died in 1989, until his health had prevented him from continuing. He wrote that he had saved what he could because he had grown up without savings and understood what their absence cost. He wrote that he had no children and that the farm would go to the county eventually and that he was leaving what he had for whoever came next.
He wrote: The firs are good trees. Patient. They grow whether you watch them or not. Whoever is reading this bought something nobody else wanted and that probably means you needed it more than they did. Use this on the farm. The trees will do the rest. They always have. — J.W., 2001.
I read it to Meg.
Biscuit sat between us with the specific satisfaction of a dog who has completed a task.
I looked at him.
“Good boy,” I said.
He already knew.
The back taxes were paid the following week.
The first Christmas tree harvest was that December — partial, the largest trees, sold to three retailers in Boone and one in Blowing Rock who had been buying High Country Frasers for years and who paid the premium price that the premium product warranted.
It was enough.
More than enough.
Meg moved into the cabin in January — there was room for two if you didn’t mind the loft, and she didn’t mind the loft, and the arrangement suited both of us.
Biscuit sleeps on the porch in good weather and by the stone fireplace in bad.
He has one chewed ear and twenty-nine acres and the deep contentment of a dog who has found exactly where he belongs.
I understand the feeling completely.
