Trees on the Prairie

From E. B. White’s “A Report in Spring,” written in 1957:

One never knows what images one is going to hold in memory, returning to the city after a brief orgy in the country. I find this morning that what I most vividly and longingly recall is the sight of my grandson and his little sunburnt sister returning to their kitchen door from an excursion, with trophies of the meadow clutched in their hands—she with a couple of violets, and smiling, he serious and holding dandelions, strangling them in a responsible grip. Children hold spring so tightly in their brown fists—just as grownups, who are less sure of it, hold it in their hearts.

While the passing of fifty years has not been kind to the first sentence in this paragraph, that last sentence is timeless. It’s one of many I wish I had written.

In the midst of this sabbatical, the paragraph as a whole struck a chord for me, not only because it will be interesting to see what images stick in my memory (and those of Dana and the kids) after we return to Sioux Falls, but also because its been interesting to see which images are summoned to the surface by the day-to-day events of our current stay.

The local electric company has undertaken the task of clearing the trees and brush along the rural power lines. They’ve hired a company called Poor Boys out of Fairplay, Missouri, which has had a crew and a couple million dollars of massive machines running up and down the roads around here. Yesterday, they came to clear out some trees around the power lines that lead from the road to the trailer we’re living in. The mobile home we’re currently living in sits on the same slab that held the double-wide mobile home I grew up in, so these trees, which stand just east of the trailer, suddenly became the source of some of those images to which White was referring.

Just beyond the trees, Dad and I (mostly Dad) were loading the trailers with round hay bales to take back south. While the Poor Boys took out only a few trees along the power line, Dad mentioned that he wanted to take out the whole bunch of them, as the land is currently producing nothing when it could go to grass to feed cattle. There is nothing picturesque about the little clump of trees. It consists entirely of what my dad calls scrub oak (I think), spindly little trees that are neither tall, nor imposing, nor particularly beautiful. However, when I was younger—probably somewhere between ten and thirteen—my younger brother and I used to go out and play in these meager trees. We were in Boy Scouts at the time and learning to lash things together. A little clearing among the tree trunks became something of a hideout, complete with makeshift “doors” lashed together and hung on opposite sides of the clearing. The “doors” were about the size of those swinging doors in the entrance to a saloon on Gunsmoke or Bonanza or some other western. But, of course, our doors were hung from the limbs above. I think one has to be an Eagle Scout before he learns to lashing together hinges.

As I recall, the trees also contained an old well and a trash mound that was a regular source of discovery—old bottles and pieces of rusted metal from contraptions both familiar and foreign. These details later became part of a meager little poem written for my M.A. report, which was titled “Under the Rocks,” after a line from Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It.

Under the Rocks

I
Removing first the rocks and then the one-
by-twelves above the well, we dropped the stones
and broken bottles captured out of ash,
and waited for the splash that would not come.

II
We turned to stacking—laid our dog to rest
beneath a humble mound of limestone, left
the blackened cinders under the fire ring
after our campout with Dad—our first and last.

III
We buried Grandpa—who took us fishing, turned
the rocks and sifted through the soil, endured
the shining grubs, some stretching toward the sun,
some playing dead, afraid to be unearthed.

Watching some of those trees come down, and anticipating the eventual clearing of the whole clump, I encountered a bout of nostalgia, of course. I also found myself thinking about why such a meager clump of trees should have an emotional resonance. This led to some reflection on the nature of the imagination (or perhaps just my imagination). As much as I love the prairie and the wide open spaces, it seems to me there is something about confinement that sparks the imagination. Perhaps this is why people generally prefer forests and mountains, with their nooks and crannies, the imagination expanding with each unexpected clearing, each surprising discovery. I thought of Lewis’s wardrobe, with its confinement that opens up into a world of imagination and wonder. I suppose each of us—particularly as children—finds the necessary nooks and crannies—whether they are in a wardrobe up in the attic, or in a clump of trees east of the mobile home.

The [What Week Is This?] Update

Here are some of the highlights from the last week or so.

Firsts

• Put a tag in a calf’s ear.
• Notched that same calf’s other ear.
• Burnt pastures.
• Watched as Dad “put down” a cow with a broken hip.
• Took down a section of old barbed-wire fence.
• Made the rounds of feeding cattle.

Outside of my own personal history and context, this isn’t much of a list. Its unremarkableness is part of its significance, however. Consider the following from Wendell Berry’s “Think Little” and “Economy and Pleasure,” respectively:

The average American farmer is now an old man whose sons have moved away to the cities. His knowledge, and his intimate connection with the land, are about to be lost.

One of the most regrettable things about the industrialization of work is the segregation of children. As industrial work excludes the dead by social mobility and technological change, it excludes the children by haste and danger. The small scale and the handwork of our tobacco cutting permit margins both temporal and spatial that accommodate the play of children. The children play at the grown-up’s work, as well as at their own play. In their play the children learn to work; they learn to know their elders and their country. And the presence of playing children means invariably that the grown-ups play too from time to time.

The fact that I am now, as a forty-year-old, accomplishing some of these “firsts” that might have been accomplished long ago is indicative of the extent to which my own childhood was “segregated.” As a child and an adolescent, I saw that segregation as a blessing. As a younger man, I rarely thought about it. Now, however, I find myself lamenting the fact that I was so completely excluded from the work of my dad.


There’s an Angus Ambassador?

Last Thursday, the weather was wet and the creek was high, so Dad decided we should grab the kids and head to a bull sale over in Fredonia. A ranch down in this area that runs registered Angus cattle was selling about 80 bulls and a few high-end cows. I’d been to several cattle barns and livestock sales, of course, but I had never been to one that was quite this specialized. It’s a little bizarre. The sale included a twenty- to thirty-page program printed on glossy paper, with key stats for the registered bulls, almost like the batting averages or RBIs on the back of baseball cards. The stats included averages and scores related to everything from the birth weights of a bull’s progeny to ultrasound readings reflecting the muscle mass of the rib eye. The beginning of the program included a list of the ranch’s “Reference Sires,” the notable ancestors for the various bulls in the sale. If you’re at all familiar with horse racing (i.e., watch coverage of the Kentucky Derby or something), then you might have a sense of what I’m talking about. Otherwise, I suspect the whole thing would seem rather arcane and bizarre. I’m thinking there’s an essay in the whole experience—perhaps something akin to Susan Orlean’s “Lifelike” (BAE 2004) or David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” (BAE 2005).

As we were sitting in the sale barn, eating our complimentary lunch, and waiting for the sale to begin, a young woman walked in wearing a tiara. Kind of surreal. Later, after she had donned a leather sash (think of a cross between the Miss USA pagent and the National Finals Rodeo), I gathered that the young woman was the “Angus Ambassador.” Who knew?


The Writing Life

Quite apart from the challenges of time management (both the weakness I have cultivated over my life and the demands of ranching, fathering, and trying to write), the writing life during my stay in Kansas has been frustrating. Some of these frustrations have to do with audience. (Who is the audience for the essays I’m envisioning? Why would that audience be interested in what I have to say?) I’m trying to keep reminding myself about Peter Elbow’s article on ignoring audience, trying to realize that concerns of audience are a bit premature. Another frustration is focus. Because I’m thinking about these essays as a collection, and because at least six of those essays (not counting any new possibilities that might surface along the way) are related to the family ranch in one way or another, I find myself jumping mentally from one idea to the other without taking/making the time to really dive in on any of them.

Then, this evening, I picked up Essays of E. B. White, which I checked out from the Independence library, and encountered what I believe will be a new friend. To my recollection, I had never read any of White’s essays. Having now read only the foreward and the first essay (“Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”), I’m hooked—both consoled and encouraged.

From the forward:

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

Can’t help but wonder what E. B. White would think about blogging.

A writer who has his sights trained on the Nobel Prize or other earthly triumphs had best write a novel, a poem, or a ply, and leave the essayist to ramble about, content with living a free life and enjoying the satisfactions of a somewhat undisciplined life.

While I can’t claim the title of “essayist,” I’m at least encouraged by the degree to which my life embodies the “rambl[ing] about” that White describes.


From “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”:

[…] I would rather have a ringside seat at a cattle sale than a box at the opera […]

National (Cowboy) Poetry Month

Since this is National Poetry Month and I'm not at USF to clutter people's inboxes with emails for the annual poetry blitz, I thought I would go ahead and include a poem here. One of the first things that Dana did after we brought the kids down was to get a library card and the Independence Public Library. On their first visit, Dana saw a book titled Prairie Poetry: Cowboy Verse of Kansas and checked it out for me to take browse. While some of the poems are stereotypically "cowboy poetry" (i.e., narrative ballads featuring more novelty and/or charm than craft), there were some poems that struck a chord. The poem below, by Tom McBeth, may actually end up working its way into one of the essays I'm working on. It's not a great poem. Many of you may find it a bit pedantic and/or sentimental, but, as one of those "kids" trying to figure out "what to protect," I found the poem resonating with a number of the tensions driving this whole sabbatical thing.


All That's Left

All that’s left is the skeleton windmill;
Its vane is whirling with the changing wind,
Though the waterpump is rusting, silent, still.
All that’s left of self-reliance’s place
Is Grandma’s perennial bed of yellow iris
And the cottonwood shading discarded grace.
All that’s left of the house, barn and shed
Are a few of the hand hewn stones where they sat,
The foundation was strewn as neglect has spread.

All that’s left of then are memories, where
Grandad hung his stained, sweaty working hat
And down to dusk he worked for his welfare.
There was a porcelain pan for the men to wash
Before they ate what Grandma could prepare.
They fed on the worth of giving a good day’s
Work that all their neighbors came to share.
They were the Melting Pot, their families brought
From the Old Country for something that was theirs.

On that first quarter where Grandad was born,
They staked themselves against the prairie’s storms
With anything that sprouted or grew horns.
Now all that’s left of their generation’s need
Is the land where they fulfilled their driven dream,
Where their sweat irrigated freedom’s seed.
So many have forgotten how we came
And the land that gave direction to our way.
So few see that land and freedom are the same.

The homeplace has fallen into neglect,
That taught our folks to do the chores on time
And shut the gates and sweat a wreck’s effect.
Hard times made their families understand
How fiddlers play until the times collect
And there’s a price of freedom on the land.
All that’s left are folks that don’t suspect
How Grandpa’s was the way to harness land
and how our kids must see what to protect.

The Pad & Other Pics

Well, I'll try uploading some pictures. If it works this time, the first picture will be of the old mobile home where we're staying.

This was previously (and will be again, after May) a mere waystation (sp?) for my Dad. He'd pop in for lunches and such, and spend the night when he had cows calving. It's now home to the four of us.

Here's a picture of the calf that arrived in the first couple of days after our arrival. Dana was hoping to see the calf be born, since she's never seen a cow give birth before. Unfortunately, the calf came in the middle of the night, so she missed the delivery.

The kids' favorites: Hotshot (in foreground) and Sonny Boots.

Fire (burning pasture) ...

... and water (the creek south of the house after a night of thunderstorms).

Notes from Week One

Given both the means by which we’re able to access the Internet and the pace of working with my dad, I’ve blogged less than I planned. Here’s a list of various and sundry items from our first week with the entire family out on the ranch.


Head Lac

We managed to make the Dyer family arrival to Kansas official with our family tradition of head lacerations. Canon and I were playing as we were tucking the kids into bed. He jumped back quickly, hit his head on the headboard, and we were off on a 40-mile drive to the nearest emergency room. Four staples later, Canon is fine, and we now feel completely at home.


Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.


But not if it’s your own. Those of you who know me well know that I’m a big fan of meat. Growing up, my family had a deep freeze that always held various cuts of beef wrapped in white butcher-block paper, with “Dyer” and the cut of meat stamped on the side. While we had our bi-weekly meals of Spam, most nights we simply went to the deep freeze and thawed hamburger, or steak, or liver. Every now and then, at the bottom of the deep freeze, we would be stuck with heart or tongue. When we needed more beef, Dad simply took one of the cows into the meat locker.


As it turns out, the practice of actually butchering and eating one’s own beef is no longer tenable. Or, at least, it’s no longer efficient. I asked Dad if he still occasionally butchers a cow for his own meat, and he said that the nearest place to have a cow butchered for personal consumption is in a town over an hour away. For some odd reason, this saddens me. In part, the change in practice pokes a hole in my Wendell-Berry-driven vision of a local food economy. Mostly, it seems to diminish the independence of ranch life a bit. A step further from self-sufficiency. A step closer to being merely a cog in the agri-business machine.


It’s a Small (Sabbatical) World

I realize that any parallels between my sabbatical and Kim’s are going to be difficult to find. However, the playwright William Inge was a native of Independence, Kansas. The town 40-miles away, where my dad lives. Independence has only a community college, but each year it hosts a William Inge Festival . This year’s festival (later in April) features the annual production of Inge’s most famous play, Picnic. This year’s production of Picnic is being directed by Kim’s good friend from NYC, Michelle Pawk. (The special honoree for this year is Christopher Durang.)


Pictures

I hope to upload some pictures before too long. Probably because we're out in the boonies, pictures don't seem to upload to Blogger very well over my cell phone connection. I'll try again when I'm in Independence, where the higher transfer speeds are available.


Highlights

After a week, I find I've really enjoyed the routine of feeding cattle every morning. It's sort of mindless endeavor (though probably because I'm so ignorant of such things that my mind doesn't have any fuel to burn) that is nevertheless rewarding in it's own way. There's plenty of time for thinking, and there is something very special about actually being out in the natural world. We've seen deer about every other day, as well as a coyote and a pair of smoldering bunnies. (More on that last item later, perhaps.)