This Blessed Earth

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This Blessed Earth Page 10

by Ted Genoways


  Jenni said that the contentious nature of the household drove her oldest sister Terri away to college and then to Denver, where she became a lawyer. But the other sisters, though they also went away for school, returned after Tom announced that he planned to retire and leave the farm to the four of them in a joint trust. The land was divided equally among them but still run as a single operation, requiring all decisions to be reached by consensus. That closeness led to years of fighting and acrimony and eventually to stony silence, even as each of the four sisters refused to sell her shares. Instead, lawyers and negotiators were often called in to broker even relatively routine business decisions, and no one would budge. Divided by what they shared, the sisters remained—and still remain—bound to Centennial Hill Farm, the center of the Harrington universe, for better or for worse.

  Nearly a decade of tension followed until, unexpectedly, a threat arrived in the form of a land agent working on a planned pipeline project. He said that he represented a foreign corporation and that he was there to secure an easement—or they would face having their land taken by eminent domain.

  RICK REVVED the engine of his four-wheeler, sliding through the prairie grass. In only a few years of letting the land lie fallow—just a spot to graze his small herd of black Angus for a few months out of the year—head-high stands of big bluestem and Indiangrass had sprung up. He chugged to the top of a bluff and cut the engine. It was quiet there; the only sounds: mooing cows on a neighbor property to the north and the sighing of wind whipping across the meadow. Rick’s own cattle chomped drowsily, their loose jaws churning and ears twitching as they watched us from afar. Now February, the last drifts of snow hid in the lees of ridges and cedar trees. Calves would be coming soon, and Rick was hoping to fatten the expectant mothers before they gave birth and started nursing. They rested, dark and still, seen only through the shifting veil of ochre grass.

  Otherwise the fields appeared continuous and empty. Clouds cast shadows that seemed to move like galleons across the green and yellow waves. “Prairie ships,” Rick said. Farther in the distance, the wide bend of the Platte River curved from Central City, with its grain elevators and ethanol towers, around to a grove of trees to our east, where a Pawnee camp had been for hundreds of years. My own grandfather talked about his father going to that camp to trade in the 1880s. It was this view that Rick wanted me to see, and he pointed out a cluster of depressions along the edge of the bluff—a group of Pawnee graves, he believed. He could understand why they would have buried their dead here, with this panoramic view of the river valley.

  “I come up here sometimes to get a little perspective,” Rick said. “It’s easy to get lost in the worries of the day-to-day. You worry about money, mostly—yields or prices—and you can forget to appreciate what you have.” Rick acquired this land, about fifteen miles northwest of Centennial Hill, when Meghan and her siblings were still little. Right from the beginning, he envisioned this as the view from his dream house—a place of his own, close to Heidi’s inherited acres but with an even deeper history and one undefined by her family. “When we bought this land, it was a sealed bid,” Rick said. “When we found out we’d won, Heidi was jumping up and down. But I bent over like somebody had kicked me in the gut, because I knew that for the next ten years I had to produce every year and as efficiently as possible. It would be a decade before we could even think about re-mortgaging everything to where we could build.”

  In 2001, when all of the kids were coming into middle and high school and wanting more room for themselves, Rick decided the time had finally come. He hired an architect to help him realize his vision of a giant timber frame home, open from the ground level to the rafters, with huge bay windows and a wraparound porch to give sweeping views of this land overlooking the river. But he said that between the cost of the architect, hiring expert builders, and high-end materials, he couldn’t afford a general contractor, so he oversaw all the construction himself. One day, as the timber framers from Missouri were nearing the end of their work—the tall beams raised and walls blocked in, the plywood subflooring installed and everything but the stairwell completed—Rick climbed a ladder, stretching from the basement to the ground floor, to check out the progress of the finishes.

  Rick interrupted his story to walk around to the back of his four-wheeler. He leaned against the seat, looking up at the house on the hill. The field of grass in between switched back and forth in the wind.

  “I was all the way at the top of that ladder,” Rick said, pointing toward the peak of the roof in the distance, “and just going down, when one of the guys below called up to ask me a question. I turned and that wiggled the ladder enough that the bottom shot out.” As the feet of the ladder skidded across the concrete floor, the top slid down the supporting beam and pitched Rick off into the air. “I hit my head on the first floor going down,” he said. “That’s the last I remember. They found me in the basement with my head hung through the bottom rung of the ladder. They called Heidi and said, ‘You better get over here. We don’t know if Rick’s going to make it.’ ”

  Meghan told me later that she was with her mom and siblings, moving cows in the neighboring field, when the call came. By the time they arrived, the Hordville ambulance was already on the scene, its single light on top still lazily turning as the medics gave Rick mouth-to-mouth. They revived him and took him to the Central City hospital, where he was diagnosed with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, and several broken ribs. But they didn’t find any internal injuries, so they told him, “If you can shower, you can go home.” Rick had Heidi help him into the bathroom and under the showerhead, and then she slid his shirt over his shoulders and buttoned his pants. He was determined to keep his promise to hold a cookout for the timber framers before they finished their work and had to go home to Missouri. But a week later, still in pain, Rick gave in to Heidi’s insistence that he see a doctor in Lincoln, who found that he had undiagnosed fractures in both of his wrists and more broken ribs. Rick gave me a sideways smile. “That house almost killed me,” he said, “physically and financially.”

  Rick was nearly out from under that burden when he received a strange letter in 2010. An oil company was writing to inform him of an upcoming town hall meeting at the church in Hordville. The company, TransCanada, was planning to build a pipeline, stretching from the tar sands mines in northern Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast, and they wanted to meet with area landowners. Rick soon learned that the proposed route would cut directly through this piece of land that he had almost died for, trying to turn it into the perfect place to retire with Heidi. He went to that meeting feeling defiant. He had two natural gas pipelines under his grazing land in Curtis and knew firsthand what kind of impact digging trenches can have. “The land is never the same after it’s disrupted like that,” he said. “I don’t care what they say. It’s never the same.” But a TransCanada land agent from Tennessee, who was also an ordained Baptist minister, told everyone that the company wanted to do right by the community, that he could see that they were the salt of the Earth and that he would make sure they got a fair deal.

  Rick was dubious—and the more he researched the pipeline project, the less he liked it. The refining of tar sands crude is among the dirtiest fossil fuel processes in the world, contributing to climate change in ways that, in Rick’s view, were a serious threat to Meghan’s future on the farm. More than that, he couldn’t find proof that any of the heavy diesel that would come out of the refining would even be legal to burn in the United States, and the refining byproducts, like petroleum coke, were expected to be burned in China, both undercutting American coal and supplanting it with an even more toxic substitute. Most worrisome of all, that very summer a similar tar sands pipeline owned by another Canadian oil company ruptured in Marshall, Michigan, severely contaminating nearly fifty miles of the Kalamazoo River with oil, toxic diluents used to make the heavy crude move through the pipeline, and still more chemicals used to break up and absorb the slick.<
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  “They asked, ‘Oh, don’t you want to get your fuel from a friendly neighbor?’ ” Rick said. “But they never talked about all of the refined petroleum products going overseas or about how they were major greenhouse gas emitters. I mean, what the fuck? Why would I want a pipeline pushing toxic sludge through my soil, through the Ogallala Aquifer that we depend on for irrigation and drinking water, so some foreign oil company can make a buck? How is that being a friendly neighbor?” But Rick confessed that for all his anger, he was also afraid. Along with the promises of a fair price and a fair deal were oblique threats of land seizures if farmers and ranchers dared to resist. He stalled on giving TransCanada a definitive answer.

  “I was polite, but I was dragging my feet,” Rick said. “After it became obvious that I was not going to sign, they threatened me twice with eminent domain, on the phone and once in writing.” After he received that letter in July 2010, Rick gave in and signed the easement. He regretted the decision even before he put the documents in the mail, but he felt he had no choice. TransCanada was a $50 billion multinational, and he was a self-described “little guy,” one man against a fleet of lawyers with nothing more on his side than a gut feeling that what they were doing shouldn’t be legal. What could he do? “They crushed me,” he said with a shrug.

  Six months later, TransCanada contacted Rick to tell him they’d changed the proposed route, skirting around his property after an early cultural impact study suggested the likely presence of ancient Pawnee artifacts on his land, perhaps even graves, exactly as he had always suspected. Rather than deal with the red tape if one of the company’s backhoes hit human remains, TransCanada had decided to push the route to the east. At first, Rick was relieved. “I said, ‘Okay, if I give you the money back, will you give me my signature back?’ They said, ‘No.’ ” Worse still, when TransCanada revealed the new planned route, Rick discovered that it crossed a section of his sister-in-law Terri’s land, just west of Centennial Hill—one of the properties where he raises seed corn for Pioneer, the cornerstone on which much of his operation now rests. Though the pipeline was no longer passing by the doorstep of his dream home, the new route threatened to be even more perilous to the family business.

  Rick and Meghan convinced all of Heidi’s sisters to join up with two antipipeline organizations, the Nebraska Easement Action Team (N.E.A.T.) and Bold Nebraska, and they even started their own local group in York County called the Good Life Alliance. “They may have crushed me as an individual,” Rick said. “But there is strength in numbers and all of us standing up for the right thing.” They started going to meetings and speaking out, writing editorials and placing full-page anti-pipeline ads in the York newspaper. Rick told me that, if there was any silver lining in living with threats from TransCanada, it had been watching Meghan blossom into one of the most vocal and articulate young leaders of the pipeline resistance.

  Meghan and her siblings had been outspoken liberals since they were in high school. “During the Kerry-Bush election we had a vote in our political science class,” Meghan said later, “and my twin sister and I were the only two that voted for Kerry. Our teacher, said, ‘Oh, you Hammond girls, you just want to be different.’ ” But now, with their land under threat, some of those same neighbors were pleased to see Meghan speak up at zoning meetings of the county commissioners and committee meetings at the Nebraska legislature. She combed over the government reports and prepared careful statements. When the U.S. State Department’s own study estimated that the project would create only thirty-five permanent jobs along more than a thousand miles of pipeline in the United States, Meghan was quick to seize on the point. In May 2013, she rose at a massive public hearing at the fairgrounds in Grand Island, Nebraska, held by State Department officials as part of the agency’s approval review process. Still wrapped in a scarf from the freak spring snow swirling outside, she leaned confidently into the mic. “How can you risk our land and water for thirty-five permanent jobs?” she challenged. “If you want thousands of jobs, you will find it in sustainable energy.”

  It was that statement that gave Jane Kleeb at Bold Nebraska the idea of building a barn, powered by solar panels and a small wind turbine, on Terri’s property. “It was kind of a ‘put your money where your mouth is’ kind of proposition,” Meghan said. “We kept talking about wind and solar, but now we had to show that we believed in it enough to actually build it.” Within a few months, Kyle and two of Meghan’s cousins led construction, as dozens of volunteers from around the state helped to raise the structure in just four days. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer flew in from San Francisco for the ribbon cutting and put up money for a viral video about Meghan and the barn. Heidi and her sisters posed together with Steyer, all smiles. But it wasn’t long before the neighbor just to the south wrote to Rick to withdraw from the contract allowing the Hammonds to farm two quarters of his ground. Meghan told me later that she felt transformed by that betrayal.

  “Losing two quarters of ground, that was huge—huge. And it’s changed how we feel forever,” she told me. “We wouldn’t change what we’ve done with the pipeline, but our neighbors are our neighbors forever, you know? For generations and generations and generations. And now we have neighbors who won’t even wave to us, so how are we supposed to trust them now?” Most of all, she said she was worried about the impact it had had on Rick. He dropped from view for months during that time. Some days he didn’t leave the house, even during harvest. He regretted having signed the agreement with TransCanada, and he regretted that having fought back had brought unintended consequences. “He carries a lot on his shoulders, because he feels responsible for all of us,” Meghan said.

  At times like that, the weight can seem to grow with each piece of bad news. In November, the Republicans won their largest majorities in the U.S. Senate and House since the backlash against the Democrats after the stock market crash in 1929. New majority leaders vowed that final approval of Keystone XL would be their first item of business. In January, despite President Obama’s veto threat, the House of Representatives approved the Keystone XL Pipeline Act, and the legislation passed the Senate on a 62-to-36 vote—still five shy of the 67 needed to override a presidential veto but with intense horse-trading expected in the effort to muster the remaining votes. Even if the Democratic Caucus could sustain the veto, talk was spreading that Obama might approve the pipeline as part of a larger deal toward sustainable energy.

  Rick worried that the legacy he had spent a lifetime building was about to become a bargaining chip between politicians in Washington and corporate interests with holdings around the world. Was there anything he could have done differently? At times like these, he worries not just about the hardship of the moment but that he may have made a fatal error, the mistake that leads to future struggles for Meghan and Kyle or, in his worst nightmares, to losing everything and having to hold a farm sale. “He wants to make it better than the way him and my mom started out, but we don’t need a bed of roses,” Meghan told me. “They struggled. We will struggle. There’s no way around it, but he always tries to make our lives as good as possible at his own expense. He’s very hard on himself—very.”

  I couldn’t help but hear Meghan’s words in my head as Rick leaned against his four-wheeler, looking out over everything he had assembled and built and tried to defend. “We’re extremely lucky,” he said. “Almost everything you see is ours—from the lower farm to this bluff to the house up on the hill. And that’s a blessing.” But as soon as the words were out of Rick’s mouth, the old worries seem to creep back in. “When I’m gone,” he added, “I’ll be able to leave each of my four kids at least as much land as Heidi’s dad left us. That’s the hope. That’s what all the work is for.”

  INTERLUDE

  BRANDING CALVES

  April 2015

  On a sun-soaked day in mid-April, the Hammonds corralled the cattle back into the paddock behind the old barn. The nursing mothers were separated from their spring calves, just as
they had been in the fall, and then locked into neighboring pens for the night. Rick said it was probably eleven o’clock before the cows settled down and stopped mooing, slipping into sleep in the darkness, but they were up again before dawn, calling to their calves. By mid-morning, when the veterinarian arrived, the cows were noisy and rattling the gates of the corral. The sun was pale-bright again, washing everything into pastel hues, thin wisps of high cirrus clouds the only interruptions on the cornflower sky. The pristine clarity and spring-like promise in the air, even touched as it was with the last of winter’s chill, seemed strangely at odds with the task ahead.

  It was branding day, one of Meghan’s least-favorite parts of the whole farm year, and she was feeling short-tempered and stand-offish. She wore a down vest over her sweatshirt and a loose-knit stocking cap, with her long hair swept to one side. When her temper flared, she would rip off the cap and tuck it impatiently into her back pocket, then pull it back over her ears when her mood cooled. Everything about the day seemed to be getting on Meghan’s nerves. She didn’t like how stressed the calves were: mewling and skittish, huddling together, face-in, in the corner of their pen. Seeing how jittery and strained they already were, she was pissed that Dave was using an electric prod to hustle some of the calves down the chute, and she was surly about the very idea of hot-branding. “It is hard on the animal,” Rick conceded, “but they bounce right back.” Meghan just didn’t see any good reason for it. In an era when consumers are concerned about animal welfare, she worried it was a potential deal-breaker with boutique buyers.

  More than that, it was unnecessary work, considering that there are more modern and pain-free methods of keeping track of individual animals. The cattle already had ear tabs to identify them within the herd. Those cheap plastic tags were hand-numbered by Kyle and catalogued with corresponding health information in Meghan’s record books, an old-fashioned way of keeping inventory of the herd that required her to mark down information on the animals one by one. When the first calf lurched into the cradle, the trap closing around it with a hollow clang, Meghan yelled out, “What’s the number?” Her older brother Jesse, back in town for the time being and charged with applying the brand, called back, “That’s one-twenty-two.” She echoed, “One-two-two,” entering the number into her spiral notebook. Then she wheeled away as Jesse lifted the brander.

 

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