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keep their children from drifting away.
    So it’s complicated when a corporation from outside announces plans to build a floating lodge near the town and fly in paying guests. The site the corporation has chosen is close enough to town that the people will see floatplanes coming and going, day after day, bringing in people, taking out trophy fish. The corporation plans to moor its lodge in a place rare and wonderful, anchoring its cables to pilings in front of the only beach in the fjord, a beach where townspeople have always come to dig for clams, and where long-line fishermen—grandfathers and fathers and sons—angle for salmon and halibut. The place where mothers bring their children for picnics, running out to the beach in skiffs.
    â€œThe people don’t want the lodge,” says a songwriter whose family has lived in the town from the beginning, when the first corporation came in three generations ago. “None of us want it. It won’t bring us any jobs. And even if it did, they wouldn’t be worth it. But what can we do?” And sure enough, when a representative of the corporation comes to town, the people are polite, the way they are polite to the bears and the occasional tourist. People don’t argue here, said a fourteen-year-old girl. “In a town as small as this, you can’t just say whatever you’re thinking.”
    But the people know the value of what they would be giving up. Scarcity raises the value of anything. As peace and solitude and wildlands disappear under bulldozers in the south, their price increases proportionately. Peace becomes a commodity, like board feet of cedar or kilos of frozen fish. Solitude is precious. Unspoiled beauty sells for a premium. Anyone who figures out how to extract these resources will make a fortune.
    The townspeople call a meeting, gathering in the town hall just down from the dry goods store. “What the corporation plans to do,” a bearded man says, “is take the peace and solitude that belong to this community, the same peace and solitude the people have been saving for their children.” They will take it without asking, without giving anything in return, as if it belonged to them. Then they will package it and sell it to strangers for something around $2,500, a five-day package deal. “There’s a word for this,” a woman says, holding her son on her hip. “But I can’t put my finger on it. Isn’t it ‘theft’?”
    The schoolteacher pushes back her chair and stands up. “This isn’t about just one fishing lodge,” she says. “It’s about this one and the next one and the next. Is this the kind of life we want? Is this what we want for the children?”
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” says the corporate representative. “That’s a philosophical question.”
    But the people know. What they want for their children are salmon and yellow cedar, the river, the inlet, and a little town where wooden houses stand on stilts above great schools of fish. A place you know is home because, as a teenager explained it to me, when you open the door “there’s a row of boots and raincoats and some firewood, and your little brother is waiting to beat you up.” A place where bears roll boulders on the beach, sucking up crabs and sculpin. Where gardens grow in milk crates stacked above the tide—daffodils and garlic, and rhubarb for pies. A place where women’s voices call to children across the docks, and salt wind carries the laughter of men. A place where people can make a living, but not a fortune. A place where enough is great riches.
    Kathleen Dean Moore is the chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University, where she is a prize-winning teacher and director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. Riverwalking, her first book, won the 1996 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award. Her second,