The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (28 page)

He held his hands palms up, fingers pointing toward me. His practiced diplomacy made him seem magnanimous. He was giving me an opportunity to be what he considered reasonable. I could feel the pull of harmony, of yes.

What surprised me most was the credence this man seemed to grant me. “No. I’m saying that future generations will need that water.”

He nodded respectfully. In minutes, we’d come a long way from his angry avoidance. It hadn’t been so hard to look in his eyes and say what I thought after all.

•   •   •

I
T WILL TAKE A REVERSAL IN STATE
and national policy to protect what water is left. Such a reversal requires a general heightening of consciousness. This is especially difficult when archconservative pundits, probusiness at any cost, falsely pit evangelical Christians and rural populations against scientists and environmentalists. But despite Ward’s and my failure to reconcile our political differences in the short time we had together, I must believe that heightening is possible.

You cannot grow up climbing windmills to gaze at sunsets or trekking through pastures rattling grain buckets in pursuit of intractable horses and not see the beauty or regret its passing even if, like my family and me, you’ve had a hand in the destruction. Honest ideas expressed in the national press seep into local minds like sunlight through gaps in clouds. In Kansas, the gaps are between the way things used to be and the way they are now. Not only did deer and antelope really once play there, but instead of outgassing poison after being infused with ammonia fertilizer, dirt used to smell sweet in the spring. Nights were silent and skies were dark. Water didn’t gush from the earth as from a cut artery. And as one Goodlandite told me, “We used to get
snow
. We no more’n get one little finger in the winter, a little blow, and that’s about it. It stays too warm.” This was a friend of my
parents’ who, like my father, grew up in a sod house. His wife, a petite dynamo who used to lead the Prairie Dusters, a rodeo drill team I belonged to as a teenager, said, “The weather patterns have changed.”

These two were mainly cattle ranchers, although they also farmed and had once run sheep. They always seemed the picture of western glamor to me, she with her cute western bell-bottoms and sexy, lace-fringed western blouses, he a tall, handsome cowboy who wore a big hat and shiny boots. When I’d called and told them I was writing about the Ogallala, they had little choice but to meet with me. I was Harold and Jasmin’s daughter. But that didn’t mean they had to go along with any liberal claptrap.

The man sat across from me in my mother’s living room, his legs folded and his hat hanging off one knee. “Hell, no,” he’d answered when I asked him if it saddened him that we’d plowed up much of the prairie. “Baloney to the good ol’ days. Outside toilets, freezin’ your butt off. Look at you, Julie. You’re sittin’ in a pretty nice chair, you’re not out in a tepee somewhere, weavin’ wool.”

Now that the conversation had moved on to weather patterns, I could still feel the couple’s resistance to my environmental notions, but I was driven to transcend the polarity that, too often, made genuine communication impossible. Did they think changes in the weather were another cycle, I asked, or part of a general trend?

“A cycle,” he said. He sounded irritated, ready to go home.

“I think . . . it’s . . . a general trend,” she said more carefully.

“Is it the greenhouse effect?” I asked.

He stammered, “I don’t . . . I don’t know if it’s the greenhouse . . .” He surprised me then by launching into a spiel that, excepting the diction, might have come out of my own mouth.

“You know, technology’s great, but we’ve gone too far. We can kill bugs, we can kill weeds, we can kill everything, but every time we kill somethin’, we kill somethin’ else. Just like the wildlife out here. It ain’t hard to see we’re starvin’ the pheasants to death when we spray our stubble after harvest. Spray it clean. Well that’s what the chicks lived on, and besides that, when they’re pickin’, they’re pickin’ up some of
that chemical and they’re eatin’ it. And I’m not a big environmentalist either. Technology has allowed us to grow lots of crop. But it’s also technology that’s sendin’ us backwards on the other side. Every time you put out fertilizer or chemical, you know it’s gonna rain someday and it’s gonna run off, it’s gonna get into the crick somewhere.”

If this conservative friend of my father’s knew this, I figure everyone does. It’s just that few are as willing to admit to problems with technologies they’ve always viewed as progress.

Perhaps his willingness was inspired by hard times. A year after we spoke, my mother told me that he and his wife had lost their ranch. I don’t know if they ceded it to the bank or sold it, retrieving only meager equity. All I know is that in his seventies, my father’s friend had to go to work selling cars for a dealership in town. It was unimaginable to me that the handsome, successful, iconic couple of my childhood had become “all hat and no cattle,” as Ward used to say about guys who dressed like cowboys but worked in other occupations.

It was probably unimaginable to them as well, as it would have been to me if someone had told me there would come a day when my family would no longer farm.

K
ANSANS
IN
THE
C
ARIBBEAN

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn in opposite halves.

—
C
.
G
.
J
UNG

1

O
NE YEAR AFTER
W
ARD AND
I
BROKE UP, MY BROTHER
B
RUCE INVITED THE FAMILY ON A
C
HRISTMAS VACATION TO THE
T
URKS AND
C
AICOS ISLANDS, IN THE
C
ARIBBEAN.
“The trip will be our present to each other,” he said. I couldn’t believe such a familial, unironic sentiment was coming out of his mouth. He’d always prided himself on being unsentimental. It would turn out that he did have an ulterior motive.

So here we were descending the portable stairs of a little plane onto wet tarmac in Grand Turk. Dad never would have spent the money it took to fly the family to the Caribbean, and we, coming from that background of thrift, looked as if we’d stepped right out of Kansas in the middle of winter, which most of us had. The majority of us wore some variation of denim. Not Mom, of course. She had on a floral-print blouse and mint-green polyester pants she’d stitched in the middle of the previous century.

Jake still did not adhere to anyone’s idea of fashion but his own. He wore a plaid cotton shirt and bright-green polyester pants he’d bought at Goodwill. At the last minute the day before, he’d refused to drive with me down to Denver and stay in a hotel so we could more easily catch our morning flight. He insisted that he needed to spend one more night with his girlfriend in the basement apartment they’d moved into as soon as he graduated from high school. Pounding on his door at four-thirty in the morning, I’d been worried he wouldn’t answer.
He hadn’t wanted to go anywhere with me since I’d sent him to the wilderness camp in Montana.

I was proud of him, though. For the last two months he’d been getting up early and driving to Cheyenne, where he did the most rugged work imaginable in a Wyoming winter—for a roofing company. And to my great relief, he did answer the door.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” he said as we drove over the mountain pass between Wyoming and Colorado at dawn. He’d been scared to leave, he confessed. He didn’t know why. He held out his hand. “Look at me now. I’ve been shaking all morning.”

Was there something he was hooked on? I worried. Something that he wouldn’t have access to on a family vacation? But during the long day of traveling and talking, he assured me that his only addiction was to his girlfriend and the emotional safety she provided, apart from me and my corrective input.

And now we made the most of our time together. With and without his cousins we went snorkeling several times, paddled kayaks across turquoise water between islands of white sand, and explored a mangrove swamp. The two of us took turns driving a little rented jeep on the left side of the street, as local law dictated, through pothole minefields and throngs of children, chickens, and stray dogs. We ventured far, over a rough limestone road, to the windward end of the island, where we hiked down a trail carved between cliffs and played in steep waves, leaping them as they broke along the shore. Our daring reminded us both of the outdoor adventures we’d had before his rebellion had put us at odds.

Eighteen was the legal drinking age on the island, and each night Jake and my niece, Abby, would belly up to the poolside bar. After putting Mom to bed, I would join them for a round. I admonished Jake to limit himself to just two. “Sure, Mom! He will! I’ll see to it!” Abby would call as I returned to my room. For hours afterward, her laughter would carry on the night breezes through my room’s open window. Interspersed among the accented English of their islander mates were bars of Jake’s laughter. It had been too long since I’d heard him laugh
outside my window. It reminded me of the sound the paddles made knocking against the sides of our kayaks.

But all was not smooth paddling among the Bairs. Baking outdoors in the island’s glare, we became hot and temperamental. We made scenes in public and played out our dramas over continental breakfasts, in the lobby and beach stores, and on the boats. We shouted at Mom, using her deafness as an excuse. Josh complained that he couldn’t enjoy himself scuba diving because he had to look out for his girlfriend, Lace. She said get used to it, she was always looking out for their daughter, Jess, at home. On several occasions, my sister-in-law, Kris, took care of Jess so that the couple could have some alone time, but when alone together, they fought. Bruce withdrew to his room, where he played his twelve-string guitar and drank six packs and bared his belly to the breeze from the air conditioner. It must have been hard on his nerves, trying to ensure everyone’s happiness.

We fulminated over ten-dollar hamburgers but kept slapping down our credit cards, tapping reserves of money stored over years of irrigated grain harvests. What else could we do? We had to eat. Mom surprised us by growing quickly accustomed to the prices. Dad had always said she could pinch a penny so hard it turned into a dime. Now she said, “I may as well enjoy all this money while I still can.” What a strange philosophy. Was this the real Jasmin, emerging from the shadow of Harold? If she could change, then were we changing too?

How was it that our family, who had not spent more than a few nights under the same roof since we left the farm, had chosen to be here together? Feeling the strangeness of this, I imagined that the laughter I heard at night was not Jake’s, but my brother Clark’s, rising through the grate in my farm bedroom’s pine floor.

One night, I dreamed that I woke and stumbled out to morning coffee to see Dad sitting across from Mom, wearing the dapper straw hat he reserved for summer trips to town, along with adobe-colored pants and a linen jacket like Pablo Neruda had worn in that movie I saw about his years on Capri.

I woke that morning to roosters crowing. “Listen!” Mom said, from
the bed next to mine in the room we shared. “For a minute there I thought we were back on the farm.”

•   •   •

T
HE FARM TURNED OUT TO BE
B
RUCE’S
ulterior motive. Halfway into our weeklong vacation, he asked us all to a group dinner. This was heartening, as we had been straggling off to separate restaurants for our meals.

After we’d devoured the pork, conch, and shrimp dinners he’d paid for, he said, “I gathered you here for a reason.”

The rest of us glanced at one another. He gathered us? A reason? Oh God, here it is, I thought, reaching for my beer.

“I will manage the farm for two more years, but I’m giving you my notice. You all will have to decide what to do with it, because I quit.” He said he was tired, that the many decisions and responsibilities were beginning to weigh on him. He was almost sixty and he wanted to have his mind back. He wanted to relax and create. He was getting better on the twelve-string and wanted to sit around at bluegrass festivals jamming with his friends. He wanted to travel more in Mexico and Central America.

Abby clapped.

Kris said, “Good for you, Bruce!”

“Yes, good for you,” I said.

Mom repeated what she’d said at least twenty times since Dad died. “Harold and I talked about this. He knew we might have to sell it someday. He said that it would be all right.” But my father had thoroughly driven into me the commandment that we hang on to our land. I couldn’t accept the forgiveness in that final sentiment.
It’s not easy to acquire it, so hang on to it, goddamn it. A lot of sacrifice went into getting it and keeping it. Don’t fritter it away!

“Sell it, if that’s what you all decide,” Bruce now said. “I plan to enjoy my retirement. If the next generation wants to take over the farm from Ron and me, fine. Now’s the time to begin learning what you need to know.”

I could see a quickening in Josh as his father focused on him. He
responded with a treatise more personal than any ever spoken at a Bair table, about how he’d been searching for a purpose in life. He hadn’t gone to college because school wasn’t really his thing. He knew he wasn’t getting anywhere working for the cable company as an installer. This would be a great opportunity for him, he said. “It’s what Grandpa would have wanted.”

“But you need to do what you want,” I said.

“That’s right,” Kris said.

“I would be really grateful if all of you would give me a chance. I won’t let you down.”

“Think about it,” Bruce said. “You don’t have to decide right now. Jake, you deserve a chance at this too.”

Jake, who must have felt like young Arthur about to pull Excalibur from the stone, spoke carefully and thoughtfully, as he imagined a man should in the circumstances. “Josh and I could run the farm together. He could manage it and I could do the tractor work. He could learn from you, and I could learn from Ron.”

“Ron isn’t that keen on teaching you,” Bruce warned. “But we do pay his salary. Whatever the rest of you decide, I mean what I’ve said tonight. I’m quitting. It’s up to you.”

Given that Bruce once had his own chance to fill Dad’s shoes, I understood why he felt he must offer our boys a shot. But I knew Jake and Josh would never take over the farm. They hadn’t been hardened into the demands of the life as Clark and Bruce had been. They hadn’t spent every summer day in a tractor seat since they’d turned twelve. Hadn’t frozen their fingers January nights midwifing sheep or milked the cow each winter morning before getting on the school bus at six-thirty. They hadn’t pitched hay, stacked milo, driven wheat trucks, shoveled grain into bins, walked irrigation pipe, dug postholes, strung barbed wire. Nor done the one bit of farm work Bruce still performed, drilling wheat each September for two weeks, twelve incessant hours each day, overcoming bleariness and lack of sleep. They had no idea how lonely it would be, living where the only companionable beings would be their dogs and cats and possibly their girlfriends, although I couldn’t imagine
Lace consenting to raising Jess on the farm. No way would Jake’s girlfriend, a mountain-camping westerner, want to live there.

•   •   •

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I
AWOKE WHEN THE
first rooster crowed, before dawn. I grabbed a blanket from my bed and went onto the pool deck, where I lay down in a plastic lounger, watched the last stars fade, and tried to think. With my eyes closed and drifting in and out of sleep, it was easy to imagine this whole foreign escapade as one of those dreams where I hadn’t attended class all semester, and now it was time for the test. I was about to be flunked out of my own identity.

Somehow, I’d managed to go on thinking that I was synonymous with my family’s land through all the changes, even through my parents’ abandonment of the Carlson farm, and my own and my brothers’ abandonments of our father, the man who kept it going in our absences. When I was eighteen and hadn’t wanted to settle for being just a wife married to “just” a farmer, I’d depended on Dad to be a farmer. Even as I refused to embrace the unglamorous lifestyle, I took pride in his mastery and success and in the land that empowered him. Through him, it empowered me. I could go make my mark in the world, and the ground of my being would be there waiting for me anytime I wanted to touch in. Now it seemed that I’d been playing hooky for decades. Until Ward came along, I hadn’t even realized I’d been absent.

Those tears Dad cried when I wouldn’t stay home that summer and farm—they were for me. They were for all of us. He foresaw this day as clearly as if it were tattooed on his hairy forearm.

I rolled over and was startled to see Jake getting a cup of coffee from the urn the waiter had set out for early birds. The sun had only just begun to burnish the tops of the palms. When he lived with me, he never got up without my practically having to throw firecrackers under his bed. I closed my eyes. Maybe he would think I was sleeping.

The legs of a patio chair screeched against the concrete as he dragged it over, making that pretense impossible. “Good morning,” I said. “You’re up early.”

“I didn’t sleep much.”

“I don’t think any of us did.”

He leaned his elbows on his knees and cradled his coffee cup between his hands. “So what do you think?”

I knew the vision that danced in Jake’s head. He saw himself working side by side with Josh, Ron, and Bruce. Male solidarity. “Jake, it’s not realistic. You don’t know all you’d have to give up.”