The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (31 page)

2

I
DON’T KNOW WHY
I
HAVE TO DO THIS EACH TIME
I
COME HERE.
After driving around for half an hour, leaving tracks in the snow up and down the cemetery, I spot them, and almost wish I hadn’t. So . . . stonelike in their finality. BAIR. BAIR. No other words on this, the grave side of the stones, except at the bottom of Mom and Dad’s, it says
Parents of Clark
-
Bruce
-
Julene
. On Clark’s, Mom went all out, having his picture etched into the granite. He’s doing what he’ll be doing for the next however many hundreds of years, until some future civilization decides it wants the stone for another purpose. Dressed in his lab coat, he’s pouring liquid from one test tube into another. The photo was taken when he still had a beard and most of his hair.

The surnames on the surrounding stones are the old family names, most of them associated with a section or more of land someplace in the county. The map that hangs in the registrar of deeds office over at the courthouse still has our name on it, but only because Bruce and I held back from the sale a half section of Conservation Reserve Program land that was too hilly to farm.

Our disappearance, by and large, from that map doesn’t bother me as much as it has over the six years since the sale because on this visit home I’ve seen some heartening things. On a farm about halfway between Goodland and what was once our farm, I met Sherman County’s largest organic farmer. Just having to use the superlative form of the adjective, alone, is amazing. There is more than one!

Yesterday, I sat in Stan and Becky Purvis’s kitchen and heard Stan’s story of growing up on the farm with one brother. They both wanted to come back, but their parents didn’t have enough land to support three, or even two, families. Stan tried to farm anyway, but in the early nineties, after his dad called him an “environmental wacko” for experimenting with organic grains, he bought a truck and began a career hauling grain for others. Ten years later he was hauling a load of wheat to a Front Range mill for some Mennonites from the county south of ours when a number on the computer screen inside the scale house caught his eye. “Is that what you’re paying for this wheat?” he asked. The guy inside said yes. Stan knew what he was going to be doing from then on.

It seemed fitting that he got his start in organic farming by following the Mennonites’ lead. Kansas’s early Mennonite settlers brought winter wheat to this country in the first place. They emigrated from the Russian steppes, where the climate and soils were very similar, and the wheat thrived here. Hard, red winter wheat. I’d heard the phrase since earliest childhood, when the market grain announcers on the radio spoke so fast the words blurred together.
Kansas City barley upapenny at three-twunny-three, sorghum’s holding steady at two-eight-dee-nine. Hardredwinterwheat offanickel.
The Mennonites never stopped raising it the old way, without chemicals.

Stan’s uncle helped him purchase some family land that his great-grandfather had homesteaded in 1886. He now received two to three times the price conventional growers did for not only his wheat but also everything from white corn to millet. The profits had made a convert even out of his dad, who let him take over his land when he retired. Stan now farmed fifteen hundred acres organically.
This was a lot for an organic operation, but not by plains conventional standards.

“Conventional agriculture is all about bigger equaling better,” he said. “That has cost a lot of young farmers the ability to get in the game.” For him, going with organics and not expanding beyond his ability to keep up with the crops, which do demand more cultivation and time, had been a way to stay on the farm. That was as philosophical as Stan got. He wasn’t like the young farmers I’ve met along the Front Range who want to grow healthier food while building the soil, although when I mentioned earthworms—the real kind, not investors—he did affirm that his neighbors’ soil probably had next to none, while he had plenty. And he was proud of that.

The wind blows stinging snow at my face, making me glad that I’m wearing my sunglasses. I usually want to rip them off here, to enjoy the colors in their pure form. I am bundled in my down coat and wool mittens over wool gloves, but my bottom half is cold already. On the back side of the stone, Clark is still doing his triathlete thing—swimming, biking, running.

And Dad still has his stalk of wheat. Mom has an iris.

What are you doing out here on a day like this?

Coming to see you, Mom. What’d you think?

Why didn’t you wait for a nicer day?

I couldn’t, Mom. Remember? I don’t live here anymore.

Oh. Well, I still think you’re crazy. I wouldn’t be caught dead going out on a day like this.

There are many things I want to tell her. But it’s too friggin’ cold out.
Look, Mom, I brought you some flowers. Daffodils.

It’s crazy putting flowers out in this
weather.

They’re fake, Mom.

Well I know that.

I wanted to buy something better suited for winter, but there wasn’t much choice at Walmart. I’ve been in town two days and already I’ve had to go out there three times. A whole town under a metal roof. There’s Twila’s, I think as I walk past the fabric section. There’re four
clothing stores. There’s the shoe store. There’re all three groceries—Safeway, Bogarts, and the IGA.

When the snow melts, Mom, it will be spring and yours will be the first ones. Bright yellow when no one else has even a bud showing.

I insert the first of the four bouquets into the vase on her side of the stone but see from the way the wind catches it that it won’t stay long. I forgot to bring newspaper. I always stuff some down in the bottom, to hold the flowers in place—the way she used to do when we visited family graves together.

I’ll come again tomorrow, Mom. Right now I’m going to go sit in the truck. I’ll talk to you from there.

Okay. But you really don’t have to go to all that trouble with the flowers.

•   •   •

T
HE DAY AFTER MEETING WITH
S
TAN,
I
went to Atwood, in the county northeast of Sherman. Much of the land around that small town is rugged and hilly, dotted in soap weed, the local word for yucca. To me, the hills are beautiful, and I suspect that beauty has a lot to do with why I’ve never met anyone from that little town who didn’t love it. If they no longer live there, they want to move back. Chris Sramek, the guy I went there to see, had made it his life’s work to help people do exactly that. He graduated from high school in the mideighties, a very difficult time for farmers and farm communities, and was told that he would have to leave home to find a good job. But he stayed in touch with his classmates, many of whom felt the same way he did about Atwood. Over the years, a dozen or so, like him, had managed to return.

I wanted to talk to him because he directed the High Plains Food Co-op, a group of farm families who raised everything from free-range chickens to yaks and sold their food products in cities along the Front Range. The co-op seemed to be only one of about a thousand ways that Chris and his friends were revitalizing their community. But for me it was the most interesting because here were people who had grown up
on farms like ours and who’d left, as I had, but unlike me, they hadn’t dismissed or rejected the place when they were young.

Chris told me stories of returning farmers’ children who were starting over from the ground up, with egg farms and roving chicken-processing businesses and free-range turkeys. I learned from him and others I spoke to that this type of thing was happening all over the area. One of Sherman County’s own county commissioners raised grass-fed bison and cattle and sold the meat both locally and nationally.

I asked Chris what motivated his involvement in organic and natural foods. He said, “Health, health, health.” He said it three times because he wasn’t talking only about human physical health but the health of the community and the land. He thought of the High Plains, all the way from western North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, as a single bioregion, the Ogallala Commons. He’d been influenced in this thinking by a nonprofit group of that name, led by a friend of his, Darryl Birkenfeld, also a friend of mine. That’s how I’d found out about Chris.

Darryl was a former Catholic priest, educator, and sustainable ag apostle who devoted himself to helping High Plains communities survive. He and his board of directors—Darryl’s “five foot soldiers,” as Chris called them—advocated taking common responsibility for the “commonwealths,” including water. The group’s literature featured a map of the Ogallala Aquifer. During the opening ceremony at one conference, which took place, fittingly, in Ogallala, Nebraska, two performing artists held up jars of Ogallala water and called it sacred. The leaders of that organization knew the names of the plants and animals that thrived on the High Plains, whether in the past or present. They knew which tribes had been evicted for their great-grandparents’ settlement and the names of those tribes’ leaders. They had a sense of history and a conscience. If I were a young person and had encountered thinking like that when I still lived at home, I might never have left.

“Darryl and his five foot soldiers came through here scattering their seeds,” said Chris, “and they’ve been growing ever since.” With
their help, Chris had organized an entrepreneurs’ fair in Atwood ten years ago, and still staged it annually.

A winter storm had been forecast, but after leaving Atwood, I entered the Beaver Valley on the east end and began angling toward Sherman County. It would be perhaps forty miles of back roads in advancing inclement weather, but I wanted to see the Collier spring once again. It was instinct, a form of touching home or paying my respects, not unlike stopping at the cemetery to see Mom, Dad, and Clark, although the spring, I hoped, would still be alive.

On the way I had a stop to make, at the Beaver Creek Lodge, a pheasant-hunting lodge owned by a woman named Alice Hill and her husband, Jeff. Alice was one of these powerhouse foodie entrepreneurs I would expect to meet at a national forum on Slow Food, but never in my own home territory on the Kansas plains. She and Jeff had turned their old stone house, which sat on a grassy ledge beside the creek, into a gorgeous showplace. Like the farmers in the High Plains Food Co-op, they drew on clientele from the Front Range.

Alice, who had always been an avid reader, had learned much about organic gardening and animal husbandry from magazines and books. She grew almost all of the ingredients in the home-cooked meals she served her lodgers. And she had recently gotten a grant to build an agroponics demonstration project, which would add fish and lettuce to her menus year round.

Like Chris, she proved to be openly environmentally minded. “Look at what we’ve gone to,” she said. “Almost all of the land around here is on chemical fallow now and one hundred percent petrochemical inputs.” Chemical fallow is one of the forms of no-till agriculture that is getting all the hype. It means fallowing ground to conserve moisture, as we always did, but spraying it instead of tilling it after harvest to kill weeds. The inputs Alice referred to are petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides plus all of the diesel fuel it takes to run the equipment. As to outputs, those are the crops themselves. Food. “Inputs and outputs.” Everyone uses the lingo in farm country, even if, like Alice, they don’t buy into the mentality of industrial farming. The same
type of thinking views those who purchase the outputs as consumers instead of simply people.

“You see the airplanes spraying crops or you see the spray rigs going back and forth across all of the fields, and you know those chemicals permeate everything,” Alice said.

I’d observed one of the giant rigs spraying a field the day before. It had a cab on big wheels and two long wings sticking out, like a giant robotic dragonfly, except it had no tail and there had been nothing beautiful about it. It crossed the field at a faster clip than I’d ever seen a farm implement travel. On the plains you are constantly aware that you are on a planet, but in witnessing an operation like that, with endless miles of farmed land as a backdrop, I felt as if I were on a planet in a science-fiction movie, one that had been completely colonized by aliens.