The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (30 page)

He crossed the street, his back and shoulders hunching as Dad’s used to do when he or Clark had done something really stupid, like twist a field implement around a telephone pole or forget to turn off the diesel tank so that all the fuel siphoned out onto the ground.

And they were left just standing there, wondering if they’d lost his love.

•   •   •

I
T WAS AS IF WE’D ALREADY TAKEN
the step down in stature that our imminent landlessness foretold. The First National Bank’s trust officer ushered Mom and me into the staff break room in the basement. Bruce, Ron, the real estate agent, our lawyer, and two accountants were sitting around a table with a Masonite top and folding metal legs like those you see in church basements. The last time we met at the bank, to sign papers shortly after Dad’s death, we’d been given the plush conference room. The coffee was made in this room and brought to that one, paneled in mahogany and carpeted in green. To symbolize
money, I assumed. On this day the casters of its big cushioned chairs were no doubt straining under the weight of the farm’s prospective buyers. The three brothers were as large as linebackers, our real estate agent told us.

Earlier, Bruce had been wearing jeans and a blue Levi’s shirt, both faded and baggy. Now he wore white pants and a white jacket over a bold orange-and-green shirt. His Panama hat lay upside down on the chair beside him. Here would be our Pablo Neruda, except he didn’t look dapper in summer linen. He looked rumpled and distorted. His beard and hair and eyebrows were all out of hand, as usual. But this seemed preferable today. Any trimming would have left a face and eyes too glaring in their nakedness. I wished he hadn’t stomped out earlier. But what had I expected? If we could talk, we probably wouldn’t be here.

“Tell ’em we’ll throw the wind rights in for free,” Bruce said to the real estate agent, then grinned. He was lampooning his own efforts, in the late nineties, to lease our land’s wind rights to a Dutch developer, who, during the six-year term of the option to explore, never set up a single wind meter.

Ron, sitting beside Bruce, laughed sarcastically. “He’s a firecracker,” Dad had often said about Ron. Tightly wound, high-strung, he had the look of a classic cowboy—scrawny bowlegs and nonexistent butt, ruddy skin and face. I’d found out when I’d pastured my horse Henry on the farm for a while that he had no affinity for equines, but that didn’t prevent him from wearing shirts that snapped.

The real estate agent had been a popular kid in high school. The banker, also a hometown boy, still called him Butch. When first we asked for a shorter term on the note, then wanted to tie the interest rate to prime, Butch said, “Okay,” his voice quaking as if he were afraid to risk the linebackers’ wrath. But we hurled him out our room’s door and down the hall anyway, like a ball we were working toward our questionable goal.

What would we really be losing? I asked myself. Only some minor conveniences and imagined possibilities. I wouldn’t be able to leave my
dog on the farm when I traveled anymore. None of us could park our old vehicles in the implement lot as we’d always done, with intentions of rebuilding the engines someday, then watch as, over the decades, they became classics, their book value increasing and their conditions worsening as their tires cracked and hired hands’ children shattered the windshields with stones or bullets. When the big flu epidemic or nuclear war hit, we wouldn’t be able to reunite on the farm, a cohesive family once again, raising our chickens and watering our vegetable garden with the aid of a windmill.

While we waited for Butch to return from the conference room, one of the accountants said he’d begun investing in Conservation Reserve Program ground, land that the government paid farmers to set aside. Once the contract term ran out, the land could be grazed.

“Lots of farmers in the Texas Panhandle are grazing cattle on their former corn land,” I declared, true, as ever, to my obsession over the declining Ogallala. “Only because they have to, of course. They don’t have enough water left to raise corn or soybeans. Used it up.”

Was it my imagination, or were those scoffing looks on the faces of the men around the table? “We should start doing that here,” I added, “before we use up most of our water too. We could sell the beef directly off the grass and just skip the corn-fattening step.”

“Oh no!” objected Ron. “We’re not going back fifty years.”

Fifty years to when no one had ever heard of a feedlot. I didn’t want to challenge Ron, whose invitation to this meeting was meant to honor him. The accountant spared me that, saying, “People underestimate the organic and natural-meat markets. The demand has more than doubled over the last several years.”

The banker said that his daughter had made the mistake of ordering a sirloin from a grass-finished steer in a fancy city restaurant. Finding it tougher than shoe leather, she had coveted his juicy conventional filet.

“Argentine beef is fed nothing but grass,” I said.

“And it’s supposed to be the best in the world,” added the accountant.

That’s not fair, I imagined Bruce saying. Comparing Argentine to American beef is like comparing sun perch to carp, but when I glanced over at him, he didn’t even seem aware we’d been talking.

Butch opened the door, but paused with his hand on the knob. Beaming, he cast his gaze slowly around the room. That fetching schoolboy smile must have been the cornerstone of his teenage popularity. He gently closed the door.

The gun fired.

“We have a deal,” he said.

“Yahoo!” said the accountant.

The banker said, “I’ll draw up the acceptance.”

Bruce began to speak but interrupted himself. “I can’t—” He placed his Panama hat on his balding head and stood. “Send me anything you need me to sign,” he said, his voice breaking as he rushed from the room.

Had I been twenty years younger, I would have begun to question our accomplishment in that moment, based solely on Bruce’s reaction. At fifty-seven, determined to experience my own feelings, I went through a brief elated phase—that of winning a game or concluding any business successfully. I hugged each of the people there, Kansans all, who only hug their moms and spouses.

Mom smiled graciously and thanked everyone as they congratulated her. I held her arm to steady her as she eased her walker into the elevator, then helped her into the car so that I could drive her back to Wheat Ridge Acres. Not only had she lost her husband and most of her friends to death, she was now reduced to living in two small rooms. But ownership, the clinging to stuff, she knew on some unarticulated level, was a misplaced passion. She maintained her equanimity by focusing on each moment—that and the immediate future. Her next hair appointment. Or her favorite TV program,
Wheel of Fortune
.

She tilted back her lift chair and pushed the button on her remote control. “Oh good,” she said, “It’s starting. I didn’t miss a thing.”

It frustrated me that she seemed to have no misgivings about what we’d done. In me, remorse was setting in. I had closed my eyes and
kept them closed until the gun fired. They now opened onto unendurable fact.

“One hundred years,” I said to Mom.

She pulled her eyes away from the TV. “What?”

“One hundred years. Your dad traded his Texas land for his Kansas land in 1906.”

“That’s right. He did. Sight unseen,” she said proudly.

“And now it’s 2006. Isn’t that strange that we’d choose to sell exactly one hundred years after your family arrived?”

“Uh-huh, it is strange,” she said, returning her attention to Vanna White’s spin of the wheel.

It was like trying to get an emotional reaction out of a turnip, and it was probably wrong to try. What did I want? For her to feel as bad as I did? The one person who did was probably heading down the interstate toward his home. If he’d stayed, he couldn’t have hugged me or forgiven me anyway, and if he’d blamed me out loud, I would have cried. Tears in this family were an abomination, as ugly as cutworms, green and squirming in spring soil, and as dangerous to us as the actual worms were to crops. They might cut off our dignity at its roots in our stoicism.

So I did what instinct always told me to do when I was upset in Kansas. I drove out to the farm. The three hundred trees I’d gotten Dad to purchase from the Soil Conservation Service the year Jake turned one were now full grown. The cedars had thickened so much I couldn’t see through them to the back row of sandhill plums. “Quit if you want to,” Dad had told the hired man, “but she’s your boss today.” The entitlement I’d felt over that! The ownership.

The old windbreak west of the farmstead, planted God knew how long ago, raised a few rheumatoid fingers against the winter sky. Ron had taken his chainsaw to most of the dead trees. He burned the logs in the double-wide’s fireplace, the one I’d ordered with the intention of hanging on to the promising young couple Dad had hired. Not long after that couple quit, Ron and Nila made us all grateful that they had.

Kittens rolled and mewed on the double-wide’s front steps. Black, black and white, yellow, gray. Needing a drink of water and to use the
bathroom, I knocked, but Ron and Nila must not have come home from town yet. I turned on the step and took in the silence, ubiquitous, like the sun.

In the shop, breathing the scent of dusty grease and oil; in the old house, staring into the living room where Dad and Jake used to take naps together on the couch; in the sheep barn, remembering the joy implicit in so much baaing life; in every inch of the farm, I recalled my father’s presence. I drove past the cattle troughs, unused since his death. The hog pens, quiet since my departure in the eighties. If one quality most characterized the place, it was vacancy.

In the old implement lot, I stopped and got out of my car. The grass stretching from there to the first sprinkler-irrigated field was the only flat pastureland for miles around that hadn’t been plowed. Sitting on the iron seat of an ancient, rusted wheat drill, I floated for a few final moments on the quietude.

A red-tailed hawk was perched on a fence post opposite me, watching the ground for mice. At dusk the coyotes would be yodeling over their conquests and yearnings. When spring came and the grass greened, the satiny ribbons of the meadowlarks’ calls would wind through the sky, as absent in its blueness as my absence would be. I would never again hear those calls winding around me in that particular place, tying me to it with their gentle, melodious bonds.

Sliding to the ground, I ran my palm over the grass. The blades were curled and tawny, many of them streaked in red and burgundy. It comforted me knowing that at least this one patch of mild, short-grass prairie would outlast me. Each evening of every season in the years to come, it would swallow the setting sun, as it had always done. I wished that, rather than burying Clark and Dad in the Goodland cemetery, we had cremated them and spread their ashes here.

Then the one thing I hadn’t considered hit me.

“No!” I yelled into the deafness surrounding me. “What have I done?” The linebackers would not have any use for grass.

T
HE
O
GALLALA
R
OAD

Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

—
P
ABLO
N
ERUDA

1

I
SAT IN THE HALLWAY OF AN OLD DORMITORY, ON A CAMPUS THAT WAS ONCE A SEMINARY, IN
C
AÑON
C
ITY,
C
OLORADO.
It was 2008, two years after we’d sold the farm. The organizers of the Buddhist retreat had placed wooden chairs outside three doors. Behind the doors, the teachers were granting private interviews. I was next in line for Terry. I’d chosen her because she was the only female teacher and because, when students asked questions after dharma talks, waves of empathetic emotion crossed her face, like the shadows of clouds sailing over the prairie.

I expected Terry to be in the lotus posture she had amazingly held throughout the previous day and a half of the retreat. But now she sat like a normal sixty-year-old, in a stuffed vinyl chair. She had long gray-blond hair and a welcoming presence.

How was the retreat going for me? Did I have any problems meditating for long periods, she asked.

No, other than I tended to get sleepy.

“That’s not uncommon,” Terry said. “Go take a nap if you need to. Sometimes people come here from working nonstop.”

“That’s me,” I said. “I’ve been writing a book for what seems like forever.”

“What is your book about?”

“At first it was about the Ogallala Aquifer, the water under the Great Plains. But it turned out it was about more than that. My family.
And this man I fell in love with who lived back there. Except he broke up with me, and then we sold our family farm. And I discovered that’s what I’d been writing about all along.”

“Selling the farm?”

“Yes. It was up to my brother and me to save it. I mean, this has nothing to do with the dharma or anything, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about when I’m supposed to be meditating.”

“Is your father still living?”

She does have a way, I thought. “He died . . . ten, no, eleven years ago now. I haven’t quite come to terms with selling his farm. It’s all he ever did. The retreat is helping, though. So thank you.”

I was prepared to leave, but Terry’s eyes kept me pinned. “I know it’s just attachment and ego,” I added, in an effort to be a good meditation student.

“It’s okay to feel the pain,” Terry said. “You’re grieving a loss.”

A warm sheet of tears filled my eyes. “It’s hard to, I mean—”

Terry probed on. “Do you feel as if you sold your father when you sold the farm?”

A tsunami rose in my chest.

“Forgive yourself,” Terry said.

The tsunami broke. I hadn’t let myself cry this openly in front of anyone since Clark died—my face contorted, mouth open, lips down-stretched.

“Would he want you to feel bad?” Terry asked.

I could barely breathe, let alone answer. I grabbed a tissue from the strategically located box.

“He just wanted to share all he had with you,” Terry said. “He wanted you to have his connection to the land.”

Dabbing my eyes with the tissue, I said, “I’m not so sure about that part.”

“No? Do you want to meditate on it for a minute?”

I sat up straight, assumed the posture, shoulders straight, feet planted parallel, hands on thighs.

Connected to the land.
I tried that phrase out on the dad in
memory, the dad who presided perennially in my psyche. His face turned red and he smirked with embarrassment and disdain, his hypertuned schmaltz detector going off.

No, we kids weren’t supposed to hang on to our land because we were connected to it. We were supposed to hang on to it because it was
real
estate. It was real. The price might go up. It might go down. But it would always be there.

Cash would slip through our fingers. Stocks would crash. We would end up like Uncle Leonard in his decrepit trailer house with its weather-warped plywood porch on the edge of Goodland; or Aunt Ruth in her purple-and-yellow basement house; or Uncle Johnny, who had to come home and work for Dad because he lost all of his money investing in city real estate; or Uncle Raymond, who was ending his days in a VA home in South Dakota.

Broke, struggling for the rest of our lives to make ends meet.

Dad’s parents and Mom’s parents had managed to hold on through the thirties drought. Some said that the fifties drought had been even worse. And then along came Bruce and I, who sold in a wet year.

Then the other shoe dropped,
as Dad liked to say. The government mandate on ethanol had caused the price of corn to triple. Land values tracked grain prices like a bird dog tracks scents. If we’d waited until now to sell, we could have gotten more than two times what we’d sold for. I imagined the three linebackers smirking. They had foreseen this.

At closing, they had sat across from Mom and me in the bank’s green-carpeted room, three hulks who’d probably grown up on tractors and who’d given their dad what he wanted most, sons who farmed. And farmed. And farmed. I asked them flat out. “Are you going to plow that grass in the west pasture?”

The oldest one, the Harold in their clan, answered. “We paid dry cropland prices for it, so yes, we’re going to farm it.” Hell, yes, we are, he probably thought. Who does she think she is even asking? They didn’t graze cattle themselves, apparently. They bought cattle off other people’s grass and finished them in their feedlot.

They’d even planted all of the wheat ground to corn, Bruce said. Plus all of the irrigation circles. They must be using our water rights to the hilt. They must—

Terry touched my knee.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Did you have any insights?”

“It was the connection to the land thing. Dad would never have used a phrase like that.”

I watched her absorb this. She said, “He did have a connection, though.”

I nodded. “Yes, but he didn’t know it.”

“So do you. You just have it in a different way.”

“I guess,” I said. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

•   •   •

A
FTER THE SALE,
I
BECAME A LOST
soul without a construct. There were actually two constructs, and they’d always been in opposition—the conscious one of ourselves as landowners and our unconscious connection to the land.

On the Carlson farm, we’d all been part of a tapestry, a weave. There were animals and grains, vegetables and prairie, trees and people, play and work, mud and stars, the scents of manure and of flowers. I choose these things at random and it doesn’t matter what order I list them in. A specific list of the “ten thousand things,” to use a phrase from the
Tao Te Ching
,
would fill many pages. They were all entangled, of a piece.

But when we traded that farm and moved to town, then when I left Kansas altogether, I became a lone thread. While I was trying to weave myself back into the natural world, in the mountains and deserts of California, my family’s relationship with our land back home was continuing to unravel. Dad drove to it every day. He didn’t live on it. Its meaning had shifted from the seat of our family’s life to solely a source of revenue. Dad’s success growing crops still affirmed and satisfied him, but his land had become more of a thing to him, and to us. It had become a financial asset, not who we were. It is no mistake that
we use the same word in English to denote both financial worth and a moral principle we hold dear. In one line of reasoning, I actually obeyed my father’s value system by violating his first precept. I thought selling was the best financial decision.

Today, farmland prices have tripled, a greater rise than my father saw in his lifetime. Would I sell again at triple the price? If I didn’t share ownership and the decision were entirely up to me? Would I sell? Even if I knew the grass would be plowed and more of the water would be used? What bothers me more, the profits I missed out on or how our land is now being farmed? Could I have found a way to farm it sustainably that wouldn’t have led to financial disaster and without having to give up the rest of my life? Should I have given up the rest of my life?

•   •   •

T
HERE ARE PEOPLE FOR WHOM CHOOSING TO
farm is not a choice between doing right by the land and giving up the rest of their lives. For these people farming is their life. If it had been that way for me, then I never could have brought myself to sell.

My search for a way to meaningfully contribute, now that I no longer owned land, brought me to a book called
Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Farms, Food, and Fertility Matter
. The book’s author, Woody Tasch, suggested that instead of chasing fast “hockey stick” growth of their assets, investors might want to emulate earthworms, and put their money to work aerating and providing nutrients to the soil of the new food economy.
We don’t have to keep sending our money into distant, invisible portfolios, while wondering why Main Street is dying, our food is irradiated, and geneticists in China are breeding square apples
. After underlining that and much else, I closed the book thinking, That’s what I want to be! An earthworm investor.

I finagled a press pass to a national Slow Money gathering in San Francisco, where I attended pitches by farmers, growers of grass-fed beef, innovative distributors of organic and locally grown food, and dozens of inspiring entrepreneurs. These ranged from the owner of a
Point Reyes, California, compost company that recycles manure from dairies, “closing the loop on poop,” to a pair of young Seattle women who are repurposing shipping containers into grocery stores for “food deserts,” those neighborhoods where you couldn’t buy a carrot if your life depended on it. Which it might, the only option in those places being a steady diet of McDonald’s or other brands of fat.

On returning home, I joined with some Coloradans I’d met at the conference to form our own Slow Money investment club. We have made two loans so far, one to a distributor of locally grown, mostly organic food and another to a company that grows vegetables in space-saving, aeroponic towers, which use water rather than soil to transfer nutrients to the plants. The company harvests the vegetables when they are still seedlings. Microgreens, they are called.

This type of investment does not come without risk. Last year the two community activists who spearheaded the investment club asked me to join with a few others in the group to help the region’s largest organic farm stay in business. The farm had sold five thousand CSA, or community-supported agriculture, shares. In this arrangement, members help finance crops by paying in advance for weekly deliveries later, during the growing season. The vegetables and fruits had always come reliably in the past, March to November, rhubarb to rutabaga. But due to poor recent management, the farm was now on the verge of bankruptcy. They needed a large one-year loan in order to ensure delivery to those customers and to the many supermarkets that had added organics thanks to the reliability of this particular supplier. An investment partnership had been formed and a new experienced agricultural manager was now in charge, but no one could promise we would get our money back.

Woody Tasch argues that in order to build a saner food system, we will have to become “return agnostics” for a while. We’ve seen recent proof that the stock market is not that dependable either. And just think about the environmentally harmful and inhumane ways many stock-market profits are generated. That investment model originated and evolved when we had not become aware of planetary limits.

Hmm. No or little gain, possibly even a complete loss, helping a local organic farm stay in business versus investing in further environmental and social collapse. If I made this decision the way my father had farmed, with my focus solely on the bottom line, I would follow his tractor up and over that dream hill, ever the slave to his will and vision.

We lent them the money. At the end of the year the company entered bankruptcy proceedings and the investment partners had to take over farming operations, so we all had little choice but to re-up. I may never recoup my investment. But I don’t feel nearly as bad about the decision to make that loan as I did about land values tripling after selling the farm. Because this time, instead of selling out of what I could no longer stand behind, I had bought into what I believed.