Lost Without the River

by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic

  As I hesitated, the woman asked my name, and, in turn, I asked hers.

  “Doris,” she told me.

  “Well, Barbara,” she said, “this really is an unusual piece.” And she stated her price.

  Helen gave me a sharp nudge. I ignored her and bought it without trying to bargain. “But I don’t know how I’ll get it home,” I said.

  “Where’s home?” Doris asked, as she began to wrap the platter in old newspapers.

  “New York. Manhattan.”

  “Oh! I grew up in Brooklyn. As a young girl, I spent every summer with my grandparents on their farm in New Jersey. I loved everything about it, especially the animals. I knew when I was very young that one day I’d live on a farm. And that’s where I am now.”

  I laughed. “I grew up on a farm only 120 miles from here. And I decided when I was nine, I’d never live on a farm.”

  “What made you decide that?”

  I thought for a moment and recalled the summer I was given the responsibility of planting and tending the garden. I planted rows of peas, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce—the whole works—and, for the first time ever on our farm, green peppers. I hoed, weeded, and watered by dragging that darn hose in and out of the rows. By early July, all the vegetables were thriving, including the pepper plants with their shiny fruit.

  “When I stepped out one morning to check on my crop, I was completely unaware of what had happened while I slept. A violent storm had struck in the early-morning hours. All of my plants had been smashed to bits by hail.

  “I ran into the kitchen, and as I was telling my mother, my father walked in. The look on his face told us before he even spoke. ‘We lost it all. The hail took all of our oats and flax,’ he said.

  “That morning, I vowed that when I grew up, I’d never, ever be dependent on the weather to earn my living.”

  “We certainly were determined little gals, weren’t we?” Doris said, as she handed the wrapped platter to me.

  We looked at each other and nodded. Our smiles a mutual affirmation.

  VII. FINALE

  FOREIGNER

  If young people knew the future ramifications of the decisions they were about to make, they’d probably freeze and not make any at all. When, as a young woman, I decided to live in New York City, 1,400 miles across the country, I saw it only as a positive. I never considered the drawbacks.

  I made that life-altering decision to move to New York a few months after I returned to the United States. I’d been in one of the first groups of Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand, stationed alone in a small town where I was the only Westerner. As the first white person most residents had ever seen, I was a surprising oddity, tall and blond. I stood out in any crowd of locals, who were shorter and darker skinned than I. When I walked through the market, children would cry out, “Farang! Farang!” Soon a group would form, all chanting, “Foreigner! Foreigner!” in Thai. I was always on show.

  When I returned to my home in South Dakota, my hair, bleached from the tropical sun, was the color it had been in my childhood, the same as that of so many others in the community, and no longer was I considered exceptionally tall. Still, I felt off-kilter—adrift and disenfranchised. Questions my family and neighbors asked seemed to broaden the gap between us. The society I’d been a part of in Thailand was so different from theirs that it was difficult to answer the queries without providing extended background synopses. And the ones I did manage to give were woefully inadequate.

  For example, there was the Thais’ relaxed attitude, and their unwavering reverence for all living creatures. These were at odds with my American “act and solve the problem” mentality. A student, a young girl at the school where I taught, contracted rabies and died. I did everything I could to mitigate the danger of the deadly disease. I managed to convince the principal of the school of the urgency of the situation. She arranged a meeting for me with the governor of the province. After I recited the long and complicated formal phrase to address one of such stature, I explained that the ownerless dogs wandering the streets must be rounded up and killed in order to prevent more deaths. The governor agreed. I was relieved. That is, until I learned that after the dogs were captured, they weren’t disposed of, but rather taken a few kilometers away and set free. This made no sense to me, and I had to accept that there was nothing more I could do.

  And how could I explain what it was like to be watched, each action of mine noted and remarked upon? So much so that after I shared a bedroom one night, the next morning my roommate announced to everyone present that when I slept, I rolled over in a strange, inefficient manner. Nevertheless, I grew to love my colleagues and to appreciate Thai culture. I was unequipped to explain those conflicting emotions, so I began to withdraw.

  I remember with embarrassment how, two days after my return, a local radio show host arranged for a live interview, but when he called at the appointed time, I pretended I was someone else and hung up.

  Not all that many years after that decision, those miles became a barrier. At work in Manhattan, I was given only a few days of vacation, my salary was minimal, and plane tickets were expensive. I made that trip only once a year. Years later, I was devastated when I couldn’t be with my parents during their medical crises, and I missed my brothers and sisters.

  Most painfully, my sons didn’t get to know my parents well and didn’t receive the special love and attention that only grandparents can give. And Peter and Stephen were never able to visit the farm. The freedom to wander and discover that I enjoyed as a child was never theirs.

  Raising two boys in a small Manhattan apartment was a challenge. Peter and Stephen were in school from the late ’70s to the early ’90s. At that time, even the safest parts of New York City, including the Upper East Side, where we lived, were the scenes of major crimes. Schoolmates were victims of attempted kidnappings. A mother I knew was robbed of her car in midafternoon at gunpoint as she waited to pick up her son from school, the same school that my boys attended. Even when they reached an age where parents in other locales could grant their children freedom, I had to remain ever vigilant.

  So when John’s wife, Helen, and Bill’s wife, Ruth, heard that I was teaching Stephen how to ride a bike in the hallways of our apartment building, they coordinated and issued invitations. Thereafter, Peter and Stephen spent a few weeks each summer in a small town in Indiana and in a suburb of Chicago. There, they ran around outdoors, free from my supervision.

  When I had left for Thailand as a young woman, I’d enjoyed the good-spirited commotion of family gatherings, but after my return, I craved time alone. My psyche was trying to reconcile the old me with the new.

  When my brothers and their wives came back to the farm to welcome me, I wish I’d acted differently.

  After supper one of my brothers said, “Barb, we’re about to play a game of cribbage.”

  Cribbage was traditionally played only by men and boys.

  “I’ll teach you,” Bill offered. “Come join us.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m going upstairs to read,” I replied.

  As a Peace Corps volunteer, I’d been expected to be an exemplar of American culture, while at the same time fitting seamlessly into the life of my village, which was still firmly bound by old mores. Back at home, I felt the constrictions of small-town life with a new awareness. I couldn’t imagine staying, living under ever-vigilant eyes.

  I was eager to pursue my career as a newspaper reporter. New York City seemed the perfect place to do that. New York City was all about writing and authors, art and music! It was an easy decision.

  CRIBBAGE

  My brothers still play cribbage. The rhythm of their words as they tally up their hands, and the satisfaction apparent in the winner’s voice, still echo in my subconscious. “Fifteen/two, fifteen/four, and a pair is six.”

  At home, my father and brothers played cribbage as competitively as the men in town. Pauses of concentration were short-lived, interrupted often by shouts of jubilatio
n as the final score was called out. No prizes were given. However, after John and Bill left for college, my father and Bob agreed upon a reward for the winner of two out of three hands. The loser of the two had to head out to the barn alone to milk the cows. The winner’s award was to stay in the house and enjoy a second cup of coffee.

  ROOTS AND LEAVES

  None of Roy and Myrtle’s children remained in South Dakota. All of us moved to other states to pursue our careers. But as my siblings established their lives in places far from the farm, they found ways to stay connected to their origins.

  John, who as a child maintained a tiny plot of corn behind the lilac bushes, earned his PhD in agronomy and became renowned as a breeder of hybrid corn. He worked and raised his family in Indiana. Now retired, he continues a pet research project. Each January, he germinates mung bean seeds by placing them in pots in a bedroom window where they mature. Then he plants that new generation of seeds in a field.

  Throughout the summer he weeds and tends the plants, and in the fall he selects the best of that new bean crop. And so the cycle continues. This involves hard physical labor. His goal is to develop a mung bean hybrid that can be sown into growing wheat fields in order to produce an additional crop of grain from the same acreage each year. Successfully developing his hybrid would mean more grain to feed the burgeoning population worldwide. As this book goes to press, he’ll be celebrating his eighty-sixth birthday by harvesting his latest crop.

  Bill raised his family in a suburb of Chicago, where he oversaw a lab devoted to maintaining safety and increasing cheese production for Kraft. After retiring from that job, he became a realtor and established a home property management company.

  One of the houses that he maintained was located near the Des Plaines River, and, just as Bill had struggled to keep the Whetstone River’s water from flooding our childhood home, he found himself sandbagging once again when that river flooded. Twice he was successful, once he was not, and the house went underwater. Concurrent with that business enterprise, for twenty years he worked with the homeless by helping provide shelter and maintaining the houses.

  He began accumulating houses as a sideline. Gardens, also. Over the years, he’s experimented with new varieties of vegetables and fruit. Some of those have failed, others have been a success—so much so that now he is a benevolent greengrocer to neighbors and friends, giving away quarts of berries and bushels of vegetables each year. He keeps a log fastened to the back of a cupboard door where he notes the quantities he’s handed out to the lucky folks. His tomatoes are especially prized; I try to time my annual visit to coincide with the peak of his tomato harvest.

  As Bob has moved from state to state, he’s always held jobs related to agriculture. His latest, in North Dakota, involves advising individual soybean and corn farmers. After he tests the soil of their fields, he informs them of the correct ratio of nutrients to use in order to produce maximum crop yields. He does this during North Dakota’s short growing season.

  At age sixty-five, Bob began this annual routine: After the field work is done in November, he drives south to a location in the mountains of Texas along the banks of the Rio Grande. There, he works alone as a predator controller, trapping bobcats and mountain lions. Alone? Yes, alone, despite the fact that all of us remind him that doing so is not wise for a man over eighty. Occasionally, his day is interrupted when he rescues struggling migrants from Mexico whom human smugglers, known as coyotes, have abandoned in that harsh environment.

  In the months following Hurricane Katrina, the three brothers banded together and, harnessing their singular, independent personalities, drove to Mississippi, where they helped rebuild houses ravaged by that historic storm.

  Helen has always lived near Minneapolis, where she worked as a secretary. Later, she began her antique business. Each year, at every house she’s lived in, she’s planted both a vegetable and a fruit garden, until the latest house, whose location in a more remote area with an abundant deer and raccoon population makes raising vegetables impossible, but, as always, she tends an abundant, colorful flower garden.

  Easy access to fishing has compensated for the lost satisfaction of growing her own vegetables. Just as she had to walk only a short way from our house to toss a line from her spot on the Big Rock into our river, she has only to walk a few yards from her latest house down to a lake, where she fishes from her dock.

  Patt, who was a high school teacher and librarian in the St. Louis area, always bought homes with enough acreage to allow for—true to her personality—very well-tended gardens. After she retired, she bought farmland outside the small town where she lived. She rented that acreage to farmers, who grew corn and soybeans. Black walnut trees grew on a hilly portion of that farm. In the fall, she gathered the fallen nuts from those trees. She gave away some and used the others in her baking. I remember nibbling her delicious walnut cookies as we played Scrabble.

  At one point, when she was forced to live in a small apartment for a short time, she said (and we thought) she’d go crazy. She couldn’t survive without grass and flowers and the natural world.

  My love of nature is at my core, too. I always take notice of flowers and trees before man-made structures. This was true as my childhood urge to see the world drove me the farthest of our clan—to Thailand—where I taught as a Peace Corps volunteer. And beyond. During breaks in the school schedule, I visited Hong Kong, Cambodia, and the Philippines. And then, on an exhilarating trip home to the United States with Georgia, my friend and fellow adventurer, the two of us maximized our return tickets to see as much as we could. As long as we were heading west toward the United States, our tickets allowed us to make as many stops as we wished.

  As two young women traveling alone at that time (the early ’60s), we stood out and were assumed to have money. We might have been robbed or worse.

  From Bangkok we flew to Rangoon (now Yangon). At that time, an oppressive military dictatorship controlled Burma (Myanmar). At the airport security checkpoint, heavily armed guards detained us, pulling us aside and into a small room. The portable typewriter I carried made us suspect. They examined it using flashlights, making sure we hadn’t hidden any contraband in the innards of its mechanism. The security officials were convinced we were CIA operatives or, almost as bad, journalists. Finally we were cleared but allowed to stay only one night. Georgia and I hurried to see as much of the city as we could.

  Then we flew to India, Nepal (its borders had been opened to tourists only a decade before), Iran, and on to Lebanon. At that time, its capital, Beirut, was called the Paris of the Middle East. Georgia and I fell in love with the city and found reasons to keep postponing our departure. We managed to find an apartment, and, remarkably, we each found a job. We lived there for six months. After Georgia left to return to the United States, I made a side trip to Jerusalem, which was then still within the borders of Jordan. Wanting to see more, but with my funds near zero, I made one last stop—in Greece.

  Through all those countries, I took special note of the flowers and trees. I wish there’d been a way to capture and retain the fragrances—the heady, sweet scent of Thailand’s jasmine; the delicate aroma of Burma’s orchids; the spicy smell of the ancient cedar trees on the slopes of Lebanon’s mountains—so I could breathe them in one more time and, in so doing, reinvigorate my memories.

  A few months after I moved to New York, Joe and I reconnected. Joe was also from Big Stone City. We’d actually gone to the same church and attended the same high school, but we hadn’t paid much attention to each other at the time. After all, I was a senior and he was only a junior.

  In New York City, our mutual love of the visual arts, American history, hiking, and classical music was a magnet that drew us together. We dated for two years and then married in 1968. Whenever our work schedules allowed, we traveled, in the United States and Canada and throughout Europe. As years went by and we welcomed Peter and Stephen into our lives, we took them with us whenever possible.

 
Sadly, although Patt was the one who fueled my wanderlust with her fabulous tales of Arabia, Alaska, and Latin America, she never was able to explore as she had once dreamed, but she always listened intently as I told stories of my adventures.

  Dorothy, of course, never traveled. She’s buried in the Catholic cemetery, a mile from where she was born and a mile from our farmhouse, where she spent her life.

  MASS OF THE ANGELS

  Through the years, when I’ve pondered Dorothy’s place in our family’s world, I’ve always begun with the assumption that her birth was an unmitigated catastrophe, a tragedy. Now, after doing some research, I’m not so sure.

  During the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, infant and maternal death rates were high in rural areas of our region. Even when mother and baby survived childbirth, each was susceptible to infectious diseases that were often deadly. There was a paucity of doctors, insufficient—and often incorrect—medical knowledge, and an inability to provide sanitary conditions. And, perhaps most important, before the discovery of penicillin in 1928, no antibiotics existed.

  My mother’s mother and baby brother both died from typhoid fever. My mother, her sister Marian, and their brother, Brit, were hospitalized but survived that same epidemic. Mother was so weakened by the disease that months later the doctor advised that she delay enrolling in elementary school. Therefore, she and Marian, who was ten months younger, were in the same grade and graduated from high school the same year.

  In light of the time, 1927, and place, rural Minnesota, Dorothy’s birth may have been viewed as a partial success. Mother and baby did survive.

  When we celebrated my son’s first birthday, I called my mother from Manhattan. I didn’t need to remind her of the importance of the day. She beat me to it.