High Voltage, High Tension

Smatlak says he is not familiar with most of the previous Piedmont dramas, such as the "Third Battle of Manassas" over the proposed mall on the battlefield. He has heard of the Disney debacle but doesn't see any connection to the uprising over his power line.

Yet striking similarities exist. Each corporation starts with the conviction that it has achieved the kind of strategic dominance that will lead to quick victory. Resistance is futile, they believe, and for excellent reason. Every legal base that matters is covered. All economics have been analyzed. The politicians have been attended to. The utility, for example, is one of the state's most generous political contributors, donating more than $3.75 million to Virginia's politicians since 1996, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Dominion employed 18 registered lobbyists this year, and their track record is formidable even by the standards of the tobacco industry. For example, the raft of bills introduced in the current legislature to slow or stop Smatlak's baby have all been efficiently short-circuited.

This is why Smatlak doesn't see Dominion as yet another corporation caught in the threshing machine of Piedmont farmers, zillionaires, people who define themselves by what trucks and guns they own, equestrians, the cranky people whose families have been cranky in the Piedmont for centuries, and the well-funded and well-organized Piedmont Environmental Council.

In fact, he says, Dominion conducted no prior demographic or political research to assess the scope, sophistication or financial backing of any opposition it might face in the Piedmont. Dominion is not the kind of place where it would occur to them to think like that, Smatlak says. There was no place for it in their spreadsheet.

He says he had no idea the humming, buzzing wires were slated to march down the driveway and across the pond of John T. "Til" Hazel Jr., the attorney and developer who not only proposed to build that mall on the Manassas battlefield but who, in the second half of the 20th century, did more to shape the future of Northern Virginia with its office towers than any man since Robert E. Lee. He didn't know the first proposed alignment would put the enormous towers across the front yard of John B. "Jay" Adams, a former member of Dominion's board of directors.

What Numbers Don't Count

When you talk to Piedmont farmers about what's missing from a profit-and-loss view of the land, the conversation tends to wind up the same. They struggle for a while to put it into words and then say, "Get in the truck." You stop at what turns out to be the highest point on the place and the farmer says, "Look."

What you see is a spread that doesn't fit into a spreadsheet. In every direction are open, rolling, subdivision-free vistas that not only are exceptional inside the Washington metropolitan area, but are extraordinary anywhere in "megalopolis" -- that vast, Eastern, urban swath from New Hampshire to North Carolina.

If its crop were office towers and "town centers," the land below you would be worth hundreds of millions, billions -- add as many zeroes as you like -- and these landholders know it. But to prevent this from happening, quite a few have deeded away their development rights, in perpetuity, taking a conservation tax deduction or tax credit that's a tiny fraction of the kind of money they could have made by selling out.

Unlike so many farmers in Fairfax, Prince William and Loudoun counties who, over the last six decades, were all too happy to trade their view of the wrong end of a cow for suburbanizing "progress," these people are exquisitely aware of the trade-offs. They know they represent the final chapter of one of the epic stories in world history, in which farmers are now so rare as to represent perhaps 2 percent of the U.S. population.

It is not absent-mindedly that the farmers who are left have chosen a different path.

Take, for example, Henry C. Green, of Markham.

Bright-eyed, alert and erect, and with a full head of steel-gray hair and a smile always playing around his face, at the age of 85 he's the sort of Virginia romantic that William R. Taylor described at the end of "Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character." He saw them as the direct psychological descendants of the Southern yeomen whom Thomas Jefferson saw as the foundation of the republic.