by Ted Genoways
When we finally arrived at the ranch, it was too late in the day to load the bulls and get back before dark. Rick pulled the trailer to the edge of one of his fields and unhitched it, then we drove out in the grass, just to make a quick check on the cattle grazing there. He banged on the door and hollered, and the black cattle came like shadows moving through the grass. They poured over the lip of the buttes and scrambled down the gray trails they had worn. He herded them through a gate into a lower pasture, so he would have an easier time of gathering up the bulls in the morning.
Before dark, Rick drove me by the house where he had lived as a young boy. “This was the center of my life, this barn,” he said pointing. “My dad had cut the center of the haymow out. We had a big rope all the way to the roof, and we’d swing catty-corner from one end of the barn to the other.” He’d play until after dark. By then, when he was supposed to gather eggs from the henhouse to bring in for breakfast in the morning, he was certain the shadows were filled with coyotes or wolves. To stay calm, he’d list off all the cartoon characters he could think of. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, he’d say to himself, scanning the edge of the trees. Goofy, Daffy, Minnie. “And when I got as far as the well, I’d just tear off to beat hell,” he said, laughing. By then, he was sure that he was close enough to the house to outrace whatever might come clawing out of the dark. I laughed too, but I couldn’t help thinking of what Rick had told me before—how he’d spent his whole life just barely keeping the wolves away from the door and how as soon as he felt safe, he’d take another chance again.
As we wheeled up the hill toward the house where Rick had lived through middle school, where his sister and her husband now lived, I wondered what Rick would do now. If there were no more wolves, no more fights left ahead, would he enjoy his retirement, or would he live out his days regretting the mistakes of the past? “You know, Kyle and Meghan coming back to the farm has been just a real joy to me,” Rick said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Now, Jesse’s starting to come back, too. Evidently, I wasn’t quite as mean as I thought I was when they were growing up—didn’t make it quite the hell that it seemed to be to me. I worry about how they’ll do, but I think it’ll be just like when I started. A light bulb goes off when it’s yours. You just think about it differently.”
He pulled into the driveway until he reached the yard of the old farmhouse. “You think about it probably too much,” he said. “I know I did.” Inside, Rick sorted through more old memories. In the basement, he fiddled with the lock on an old chest, until the key finally turned and revealed the few things inside. Stacks of Rick’s Classic Comics with illustrated versions of Robinson Crusoe and The Count of Monte Cristo. There were a few photographs, including Rick’s high school graduation photo. “Look at that guy,” he said. “Have you ever seen somebody with such confidence?” He laughed to himself. “Yeah, I had it all figured out back then. I keep getting dumber the longer I live.”
Finally, Rick closed everything up and stepped back into the evening light of the yard. He wandered down the slope through the yellow grass. He found a turkey feather and stuck it into the band of his cowboy hat. For a moment, I thought he might make another joke about that, but he had turned thoughtful. The windmill squawked quietly behind him. “C’mon,” he said. “There’s one last thing I want to show you.” He walked down until we were almost at the creek bottom. There, among the trees and overgrown by vines and saplings, was the ruin of a tiny bunkhouse.
“This is where our farmhand lived,” Rick said. He ducked through the doorway, nothing but rusting hinges guarding its entrance now. “His bunk was right there. This was his stove. As I got older, I loved to come down here, just to listen to the way grown men talked,” he said. “He would roll his own cigarettes. I remember how he stopped in the middle of his stories while he pinched out the tobacco and licked the paper.”
The windows of the bunkhouse were all cracked and broken out, the little glass left behind filmed over by ancient grime. “My dad had to let him go when things got bad,” Rick said. “I don’t know what ever became of him.”
INTERLUDE
THE TRI-STATE
BAYARD, NEBRASKA
September 2015
I pulled the truck into the shade of a tiny clutch of cottonwoods. After the trip out to Curtis with Rick, I couldn’t stop wondering: what makes a homeplace? For Rick, it seemed to me, Curtis was where his heart had remained and would always be. It’s where, he told me, he wanted his ashes scattered. As a kid, I had felt a similar tug, drawn to the tiny town where my dad grew up, so I talked him into making the drive there, seven hours across the state. The town, Bayard, had been slowly disappearing from the time I was a kid, visiting my grandparents over the summer. And with every disappearance—a restaurant closing, a shop boarded over—there was an equal disappearance from the surrounding neighborhoods and farmhouses, another family that had decided that this was no longer home for them.
By the time we arrived, the sun was sinking in the west, but the temperature was still somewhere in the 90s, the song of the cicadas ratcheting up in the distance. I followed my dad out onto the sandy path that connects the state highway to the Tri-State ditch road north of town. A tiny house with a fenced patch of dirt sat just back from the canal; during the early 1950s, when Dad was still in elementary school, he lived there with his parents. “It looked just about exactly like this back then, except for the fence,” Dad said. “That would have saved me a lot of grief.” As it was, he said, he endured years of parental warnings: never to venture too close to the ditch bank, never ever to cross “the needles”—a concrete footbridge and series of weatherworn pickets that form a weir across the channel.
Dad explained that there is a narrow lip at the bottom, just on the upstream side of the bridge’s pilings. Ditch riders thread beams into the current, searching for that foothold, then let the force of the water push the top of the pole tight into place. By effectively narrowing the width of the canal, the needles form a bottleneck that partially dams the current and raises the flow level during dry times, but they also create a rushing spillway on the backside—a constant source of worry for my grandma. Maybe she fretted more than most mothers, having lost two children in infancy before my father was born, but her fears were far from unfounded. During the years Dad’s family lived along the Tri-State, two young children, in separate incidents, drowned in sections of ditch that ran through nearby Scottsbluff. “There were kids that drowned, no doubt about it,” Dad said. “And it was certainly a worry.”
But for my grandparents, there was little choice. My grandfather had left the Omaha stockyards to come west in 1936, then worked as a tenant farmer, raising beets and beans along the Platte River bottoms south of town. My grandma got them through lean seasons on her teacher’s salary in the proliferating county schools. They hung on, year to year, until the blizzard of ’49 pushed the family over into bankruptcy. Farmers Irrigation District, which still owns the Tri-State Canal, was willing to provide a rent-free home and an old crank telephone (the first my dad’s family ever had), so that ditch riders could be called to go out and adjust water levels immediately in cases of emergency, and ditch riders, in turn, could report washed-out sections or other problems back to the offices in Scottsbluff. Ditch riding was seasonal work back then, but they could have the house year-round, and my grandfather got work in the winters working as an oiler in the pulp drier at the Great Western Sugar factory in town.
During the summers, when school was out, my dad would ride along as Grandpa went on his rounds, checking to make sure farmers along his five-mile section of ditch were getting their allotments. “The ditch riders had to supply their own cars,” Dad said. It was a black coupe, he remembered, but paused a moment trying to recall the model. Water crawled through the channel, then rushed through the needles. “A Chevrolet of some sort,” he said finally. “He always bought Chevrolets; he would never have dreamed of owning a Ford. Mostly what I remember is that I could barely see out
.” At each farm, Grandpa jotted into a pocket notebook how many acre-feet of water each farmer was receiving that day, based on how much water was being released out of the Guernsey Dam in Wyoming. At the end of the line, he would take a final reading to make sure the Tri-State was delivering the required amount into the Northport Canal.
“I remember one time, down real near to the Northport check, out in that sandy soil, he could see water bubbling up and obviously coming out of the ditch. He tried to plug it at the end out in the field, but he couldn’t do it,” Dad said. “So he had to get down into the ditch and feel around for that hole. He took a bunch of gunnysacks and jammed them in there, then packed some mud in to try to cut off the flow of water. If you didn’t, eventually it would cut the ditch bank wide open, and the water would run out and flood everybody.”
But most days, he was just checking head gates, to make sure that there was the right amount of water in the lateral ditches and flowing into the farmers’ open irrigation channels. “There were always farmers who were upset that they didn’t get water when they wanted it or they didn’t get enough,” Dad said. “And they weren’t above trying to steal a little water from their neighbors or taking a little extra out of the ditch.” Grandpa understood that they were just trying to keep from going broke, but he also knew, Dad said, “you’re entitled to a certain amount of water, and that’s what you’re going to get. It’s the ditch rider’s job to see that you get all of that, but he also sees you don’t get any more so that you short somebody else down the line.”
Dad pointed toward an invisible point in the east. “Remember that big lateral we saw down there,” he asked, “the one at the foot of that hill where the feedlot is now?” I nodded. He said he remembered one instance when Grandpa suspected the farmer who used to live there of stealing water. Every morning Grandpa would go on his morning ride, checking the headgates. And then again, each afternoon, he would ride back along the same route, adjusting as needed. At that property, he started noticing that the ditches seemed overfilled each afternoon and began to suspect that the farmer was coming along behind him, opening the gates wider each morning and then cranking them back down before Grandpa made his afternoon rounds. “So one day,” Dad said, “instead of going home and calling the readings in, he went back to that headgate. And, sure enough, it was wide open.” So Grandpa went to his trunk, took out a big log chain, and wrapped it around the crank of the headgate and locked it—open. “So when the farmer came back to close the gate back down that afternoon,” Dad said, “he couldn’t turn the crank.” He was forced to make a frantic call to Grandpa, confessing to stealing the water, and begging him to come down and unlock the gate before it washed out all of his ditches and flooded his fields.
“This is beautiful country,” Dad said, as we shadowed the ditch back toward Bayard. “It was a great place to grow up, but I couldn’t get away from here fast enough.” He said he didn’t want to spend his life at the mercy of banks, insurance adjustors, and every storm cloud forming on the horizon—every day a fresh (but identical) struggle to beat back total loss. I understand it, too, of course. Raised in the city, with only vacation trips to Scottsbluff and Bayard, it was easy to be nostalgic for a vanishing way of life when I didn’t ever have to suffer through its hardships. Still, passing back through town, past all of the shuttered storefronts and abandoned buildings, I lamented aloud how sad it was to see Bayard dying this slow death.
“Is it?” Dad asked. He sounded somewhere between quizzical and professorial. “Maybe this town has served its purpose, and now it’s time for it to fade into history.”
I turned down toward the old Great Western Sugar factory—shuttered after the end of the last sugar campaign that fall—and was surprised to find it not only abandoned but unfenced and unguarded. I drove us around the plant to the dryer where Grandpa worked. The giant doors stood open, so we parked and walked in. All that colossal machinery (the coal scuttle, the enormous furnace, the blower the size of a semi) bore mute testimony to just how dominant the beet industry had once been. And how utterly—rusted now and forgotten—it has been overtaken by a monoculture of corn. The warehouse at the back of the building is big enough to house a football practice facility, but the wind whistled and made its corrugated siding creak, sending unnerving echoes bouncing through its empty rafters. It was hard not to see this as a symbol of the end of the era of community and shared purpose that founded the valley.
Today most farmers and ranchers are forced to go for broke each year, planting fields of whatever crops and grazing herds of whatever breeds are selling highest on the futures market. They bank on their ability to work harder and raise more than their neighbors, on the prospect that enough of them will fail that prices will remain high at harvest time. Now that ethic comes to a crossroads, as everyone faces the real possibility that a resource as basic as water—worried over and doled out and preciously conserved for more than a century—may be in diminishingly short supply. But no one seemed to be thinking beyond next year. No one would discuss the possibility that this drought was more than a few hard years, that there might be many hard years brought on by climate change and rising temperatures. For all the careful stewardship of the land, few in the North Platte River Valley want to consider that they may be up against a new threat, bigger and more complex than the one that faced farmers and ranchers at the end of the nineteenth century—one that requires them to think even more boldly than their ancestors. For now, they’re resigned to waiting and praying for snow in the Rockies.
Before we headed back east, my dad and I stopped at Genoways Hall, the public meeting room built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and named for my grandfather even before he died. The Bayard ditch runs within feet of its side door. It’s not part of the Tri-State Canal system where he worked, but I remember how, each time we went there (when I was still too young for school), he would stalk the ditch bank, breaking back weeds and clearing debris. And I remember taking my father’s old wind-up motor boat, filched from his wooden toy box on the porch of my grandparents’ house, cranking its key tight, and then letting it go. Most of all, I remember how it disappeared into the pipe that still runs under Main Street, then popped out on the other side, listing drunkenly in the current; how I held my breath—afraid of something, I’m still not quite sure what—until my Grandpa patiently fished it out of the reeds and motioned with a wave of his sun-browned hand that it was time for us to get back home.
EPILOGUE
WELCOME NEWS
November 2015
On November 6, 2015, Meghan and Kyle were in Muir Woods in northern California at their wedding rehearsal. They had decided on a destination wedding with just family. In the middle of the rehearsal, Meghan’s phone started to blow up. Texts would come through asking if she had heard the news, but she couldn’t get a phone signal to call out. Finally, at the top of the ridge, overlooking the tops of the redwood forest and out on the Pacific Ocean, she was able to get reception on her phone.
President Obama had rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, putting an end, at least for the moment, to six years of fighting and worrying about the fate of the Ogallala Aquifer if there were ever to be a spill. Secretary of State John Kerry had decided that the project was not in the country’s national interest, and Obama had called a press conference at the White House to announce that he supported that opinion. “America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change, and frankly, approving this project would have undercut that leadership,” Obama said.
Meghan hooted and screamed and started calling everyone back home in Nebraska, all the people who had been fighting at her side for years. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” she said. “It’s the best wedding present I could ever ask for.” The next day, Meghan and Kyle were married, and when they came back to York County, they soon moved into the house that Dave and his family had vacated, the home where Meghan had spent her childhood on the northern edge of Centennial Hi
ll Farm. Less than a year later, Meghan found out that she was pregnant.
Despite all of the happiness, the future remains uncertain. In 2014, Rick had warned that the American farm might be in trouble if we saw two more years of record harvests. Now, that’s exactly what has happened. The harvest of 2016, another record-setting year of production of core commodity grains like corn, soybeans, and wheat, pushed prices to their lowest levels in decades. Corn, in particular, has plummeted to less than half its market value of just five years ago. Despite the drop in prices of feed grains, livestock prices have fallen simultaneously and at a rate that made it impossible to capture profits on increased margins. This downward spiral is already having broader effects. Cash-poor farmers aren’t updating equipment or buying new trucks or even going to town to spend money on food and entertainment. The rural economy is stalling.
Worse still, farmers who took out loans for land or equipment at the peak of prices are starting to worry about their ability to service their debts with profits projected at the time—and banks are growing nervous, too. Loaning institutions are starting to call on big farmers to liquidate landholdings used as collateral, in order to reduce their risk. But this trend is already dragging down property prices, forcing still more liquidation—the exact cycle that led to a rapid devaluation in the 1980s, triggering the Farm Crisis. Today the potential dangers of a rural bank panic to the broader economy are even greater. Three-quarters of farmers have quit the business in the last thirty years, so now every failure carries four times the weight.