The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (33 page)

It had been a long drought, and then a long winter, but new life was setting in. Nestled securely as the snow flew, I logged onto my hostess’s Web server and discovered that my duck had likely been a male common goldeneye.

4

A
ND NOW
I
AM SITTING IN THE GRAVEYARD, STARING AT TWO HEADSTONES, AND FEELING GOOD AND BAD AT THE SAME TIME.
The way we do when our own lives continue to unfold, but the lives that gave us life and others that gave our lives meaning have ended. Finished,
fini
, supposedly. Except Mom and I are still talking, and I complained most of my adult life that we couldn’t talk at all.

You have a new great-grandson, Mom. His name is Indy.

Indy? What kind of name is that?

I know. It’s not traditional, but it’s what they chose. I didn’t like it either at first, but I’m getting used to it. Not just used to it. I like it. He’s the greatest little boy, Mom. So smart and cute, and his heart is full of love.

It is?
Mom says. I can hear the joy in her voice, although the only empirical evidence of my mother’s existence in this place is a block of very cold, almost-black granite.

Yes, and Jake is doing fine, Mom. He’s a certified nursing assistant, and Kate wants to be a hairdresser. They’re getting a late start because they were busy trying to reinvent society more to their liking.

Kind of like someone else I know.

There’s one thing I need to tell you, Mom.
I should be telling this to Dad, but I mainly want to talk to Mom now because it’s her voice I hear.
I need to tell you about the farm.

Everywhere I drove in Sherman County, I found that any land that had less than a thirty-degree incline had now been farmed. Lots and lots of corn. More than ever. Lots of thick wheat stubble too, “sprayed clean” as my father’s old friend had said, leaving nothing alive. But when I came to our farm, I discovered only corn stubble from one end to the other. Both dryland and irrigated. All corn right up through what had been the last of our pasture.

Before going to Goodland, I’d braced myself for this by visiting the Kansas Geological Survey Web site. The blue line representing our observation well confirmed my fears. The line’s angle of decline had indeed steepened. I studied the related numbers for an inordinate hour or more. The annual drops in water levels weren’t really that much worse than when we owned the place, I rationalized. And at least part of the decline would have been due to returning and intensifying drought. But seeing all of this corn now, I knew that the linebackers had to be placing much greater demands on the wells than we had even during those drought years that had helped persuade me to sell.

The farmstead was still there, although they’d torn down the house Mom and Dad lived in when they were first married and that Jake and I had once lived in. The sheep barn had burned down a year after we sold. Someone had been welding and a spark had lodged in the old timber unnoticed. Or so we’d been told. Maybe they’d just wanted to get rid of the barn so there could be more corn. They’d even taken out three rows of the windbreak we’d planted. Only the cedars were left, with corn right up to them. It couldn’t be good for the ground to have corn on it year after year. Corn is a big plant and must have space to grow. So its stubble leaves lots of bare ground to erode in wind or heavy
rains, whereas wheat stubble is thick and protects the ground much better. We had always rotated corn with soybeans, a legume that fixed nitrogen in the soil. But forget natural systems. As Alice Hill had said, it was all petrochemical inputs now.

“You don’t know what you let in here,” one neighbor, who was a pallbearer at Mom’s funeral, told me afterward. “They’re already buying other quarters.”

And Stan had said, “My place won’t ever go to somethin’ like that. They’re like a vacuum cleaner. They’ve been buying land up in Rawlins County, where Becky is from too.”

It doesn’t help much knowing that ours is a common story or that what happened to us is happening everywhere on the Great Plains and in the Midwest. I know that we also brought it on ourselves. I sit in my truck, an ant steamrolled by my own confused and confusing interests as much as by history, and try to imagine what it will be like if there really is an afterlife, as Mom thought, and I have to explain this to Dad. In ag school he learned all about soil conservation and protecting his land from erosion using contours, and rotating crops, and browsing livestock in his stubble fields. He was gradually abandoning all that too and moving in this direction, but he never would have gone this far.

What would Dad say if he knew, Mom?

It’s all right
.
We talked about it. He said it would be all right.

Of course she isn’t going to tell me anything new. Just the same old things are replaying in my head. But that’s okay. They are the things I need to hear. And maybe I hear them in a new way.

Bruce and I didn’t heed Mom much whenever he and I were in the same room together. Even when she wasn’t repeating herself, her voice got lost in our eagerness to impress each other. At least that’s what it always felt like to me. It took me a long time as an adult to understand that he’d seen me as a rival in childhood. There was always that competitive charge between us. Then after Clark died, we were the only ones left, the only contemporaries. We needed to understand each other, were perhaps more capable of understanding each other than anyone because we shared a family and a past, but we never took it far enough
into actual understanding. Meanwhile, the treasure that gave us content to talk about as we discussed its disposition to grain bins or banks was Mom’s, earned through a lifetime of garden growing, chicken tending, cow milking, bum lamb feeding, meal making, housecleaning, husband tending, and kid rearing. And she just kept repeating herself, being ignored. I am so grateful she repeated herself now.

Forgive yourself
, Terry also said. Her words had forgiveness in them. That’s why I cried on hearing them. Taking a more tender view of my own fallibility really helps.

The one other forgiving thing is the land itself. The high point of this trip was seeing the half section of Conservation Reserve Program land we’d withheld from the sale. Bruce had bid it into the government program because it had been too hilly to farm in the first place, but Dad had gotten greedy at some point and broken it out. That type of greediness is rampant now, and many farmers have abandoned their contracts, plowed their CRP land and planted it back to corn or wheat. More than nine and a half million acres have been returned to cropland since the ethanol boom began. That would have happened to our CRP land too if we’d sold it, but we kept it in reserve partly as a retirement plan for Ron. We signed over the remaining proceeds of the contract to him.

After driving through our corn-blighted farm, I turned onto the track along the fence line, hoping for respite, and that’s what I found. Respite in beauty. A hill rose in the center of the field, so when I switched off the engine and got out, it blocked my view of the road. As was customary with CRP contracts, Ron had planted the field with a mixture of grasses that were more native to places east of us. They were bunch grasses, meaning they didn’t form a turf and grew in clumps. The tallest was little bluestem. I never understood why it was called that, because its most distinctive trait seemed to be how red it turned in the fall and winter. It liked the low, moist spots best. On the hill, blond clumps of another type of grass—some kind of fescue?—formed a bumpy silhouette against the sky. The pasture that Bruce had traded off years ago adjoined this land, so I could stand as I had in the old
Carlson farm’s canyon pasture and imagine grass going on forever in every direction.

I was once a purist and didn’t like the way CRP grasses looked compared with the locally indigenous buffalo grass, but the plow’s incursion over the last few years made me grateful for what I could get. Most people would think the bunch grasses were more beautiful, and they were definitely more dramatic. Besides, if it was buffalo grass I wanted, I could find it there too, in small patches that would most likely spread and replace the others eventually because it was the true native.

An awareness of the land’s health coursed through me, whereas on the flat part of the farm, I had been painfully aware that the land was being enslaved and abused. Standing there proved to me that it could all be put back someday. That would be the one advantage to running out of well water or of drought. If grain crops couldn’t be grown here anymore, there would be horrible consequences for the world’s people, especially the poor, but the land would return to grass and it would heal. Ever since I was a child, I’d been thrilled to imagine the world “pre-us.” I wasn’t exactly thrilled to imagine it “post-us,” but I did take some comfort knowing that it might recover from our brief and injurious tenure.

I noticed a large object in the distance. Rectangular and gray, it lay in the crook of the valley. I wended my way through waist-high bluestem and the brittle branches of large wildflowers. I would have to wait for summer to see them in bloom and find out what they were. As I drew nearer the object, I began to notice animal trails. I stopped to photograph one particularly clear paw print, which might have been that of a kit fox, or possibly a bobcat because I didn’t see any claw marks. I’d always heard that was how you could tell between canine and feline prints, because cats can retract their claws. What a joy it was to imagine either of those animals alive and well here!

Arrival at the object confirmed my suspicion that it was a wildlife waterer, installed by Ron as part of the CRP contract. It had a corrogated tin roof built low to the ground and at a slant to collect rainwater, which flowed into gutters and down into a plastic holding tank. The
tank had a hole cut in the top large enough for animals to reach in and get a drink. That afternoon, the tank was a quarter full and had ice floating on top. I scooped out the mud that had collected in the rain gutter, wiped my hands on my jeans, stood up, and gloried in the survival of the animals that had made those trails.

Looking around the budding grassland, I understood what I love most about this place. It is the sun. The plains are high and bright, wide and exhilarating. To be outside here is to be on top of the world, lifted up and exposed to sun from all directions. Yes, the sun more than anything. Knowing it the way I do, it knowing me, so intimately and in every aging crease, many of which it caused to form, and being comfortable with so much light and openness tells me I am native here.

•   •   •

I
AM ESPECIALLY AWARE OF THE SUN
now as I follow my shadow across the snow in the cemetery, carrying flowers and a newspaper I bought from the machine at the diner. And always this shadow traveling with you everywhere. It brings a certain level of self-awareness. You know you exist and that you exist in relation to the sun and to the world. It makes you aware of the imprint you are making on the land.

I don’t have to worry about walking on their graves, because beside them are a couple of empty plots Mom and Dad purchased for Bruce and me. But my remaining brother and I won’t be buried anywhere, not if our wishes are obeyed. He wants to have his ashes scattered on a certain bend of a river he loves, and Jake is to divide my ashes between the canyon pasture on the old Carlson farm and the rock-house hill, in the Mojave. It troubles me imagining how difficult it will be for him to arrange a ceremony, because neither of us lives where he grew up anymore. Even if we’d stayed in Laramie, he would have had to think it through. Nothing ever has to be thought through in Goodland. You just make arrangements with the church your relative belonged to, and the pastor and the funeral-home director walk you through it, the way they walked Bruce and me through it with Mom.

To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It
is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not. Whether I bemoaned the loss of it or failed to have the meaningful conversations I wanted to have or couldn’t get back in by way of a man. After this trip, I am more sure of that than ever.

Daffodils for each of you. See, Mom?