A touch of the Luddite, that, but I am learning to live with my own crotchets as well as those of my neighbors.
Perhaps the brush-hogging will get done this year; perhaps not. My eye has long ceased to find trimness pleasing, and as to the multiflora roses, I have never had much use for miracles, plant or otherwise. Besides, I want to see how virus and mite, two ordinary and nonmiraculous bits of life, will fit into the action taking place in my field. I have a ringside seat.
Once I tried to stop a war, and once I really did help start a labor union at a library where I worked. But, on the whole, the world has cheerfully and astutely resisted my attempts to save it. And now that I’ve spent my winter saving my particular ninety acres of it from the floodwaters of a dam, I am left to wonder, as usual, what I have done. Upon examination, the dam proposal turned out to be as lacking in reality as faerie gold, but the local people were sure that it was real, and so perhaps it was.
The controversy got its start at the end of the summer. I was harvesting the honey crop then, and immediately afterward started on my autumn round of sales trips, so I didn’t hear much about it at first. But an item in the local newspaper explained that a Lakes and Dams Association had been formed to promote the damming of the river to create a recreational lake a few river miles downstream from my farm, just inside the strip of land along the banks of the river that the U.S. Park Service owns and supervises. The officers of the association were two men who work in the feed room at the general store. The news item amused me; it seemed a piece of folly that local people would laugh off. But then, home from a sales trip a month later, it took me three hours to walk two blocks in town because people kept stopping me to ask what I thought about the dam. I didn’t know anything about it, but I was given my questioner’s full, colorful and highly charged opinion. In the cafe, there was talk of nothing else. A petition was being circulated asking the local conservative congressman to initiate a feasibility study for the dam’s construction, and several thousand people had already signed it. I went back out on the road to sell honey, and when I returned again an anti-dam group had formed: Citizens for a Free Flowin’ River. Aside from having a fine and ripply name, they caught my attention by issuing a map of the recreational lake which showed several portions of my farm under water. I promised myself that when I got off the road for the winter I would spend some time figuring out what was going on.
From the beginning, both dam and anti-dam were innocent of grubby reality. No one knew how dams got built or why. No trustworthy figures or facts were available from either side. But that was all right, because the argument took place over what was of value in this part of the Ozarks and expectations for the future—matters quite independent of reality, facts, figures or even a dam, for that matter. The people who wanted a dam were those who thought that it would be good to turn the town into the sort of place that had a McDonald’s. Those who opposed it thought this would not be good at all. The dam was almost beside the point, and the eventual victory of the anti-dam forces was just a tiny rearguard action. People who want to exploit and change the Ozarks are still here, and will continue to suggest other plans for development.
Since 1909, proposals to dam this river have been made with varying degrees of seriousness. The two men in the feed room who had dusted off the plan came from families who had been involved in some of those earlier attempts. Once they started talking up a dam, others interested in development found reasons for it and the movement was born. The dam, it was said, could generate cheap electricity for the town. It would prevent damage from floods. Its construction would bring jobs to the area, and so would the businesses that a recreational lake would support. Land values would rise; indeed, property owners near the river immediately doubled the asking price for land they had for sale. The president of the local chamber of commerce was caught on television film, his eyes rolled heavenward, saying, “All I can see is dollar signs before my eyes.”
But there was another compelling and contrary appeal that made people sign the petition for a dam. By inviting the U.S. Corps of Engineers to build a dam on U.S. Park Service land, the latter agency would get its comeuppance. It is hard for anyone accustomed to thinking of the popular U.S. Park Service as a benign bureaucracy to understand with what loathing the agency is regarded here. The local park was established in the mid-1960s to protect the river from attempts to dam it the decade before. Land along the river was bought up and removed from private to federal ownership; this shift in title to the river’s banks has never been forgiven. As highways improved and it became easier for city people from Illinois and northern Missouri to get to the Ozarks, more people started floating the river, fishing in it and hiking along its banks, and the Park Service created new rules to regulate its use and protect the habitat. Local citizens, who remembered the old days when there were no rules and few tourists, were outraged, believing that their rights had been taken from them. They also resented, as an unwarranted constraint on the chance to make a buck, the Park Service limitation on the number of private concessionaires who rented canoes to tourists.
The dammers knew that they couldn’t make the Park Service go away, but they hoped they could punish it by withholding the river’s waters behind a dam built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, sensible folks, not like those fuzzy-minded park rangers who were always talking about the environment. The Corps certainly wouldn’t issue a lot of silly rules that would keep local people from doing what they and their fathers and grandfathers before them had always done to and along the river.
The Free Flowin’ Citizens, or at least the Ozarkers among them, didn’t like the U.S. Park Service any better than did the dammers, but they didn’t trust the U.S. Corps of Engineers either. They wanted the river to stay in private hands—namely, theirs, for many of them were landowners upriver. They did not like the idea of changing the town by bringing in even more tourists and outsiders than the federal park had already done. Many of them were concerned about the destruction a lake’s waters could bring about to the wildlife habitat along the edge of the river.
For the past six weeks I have been spending my afternoons writing letters, telephoning and meeting in offices with appropriate government bureaucrats, elected officials and staffs of environmental organizations in order to find out how dams get built and what the impact of one would be on this area.
I discovered that this cave-riddled limestone is unsuitable for dam construction, that the Corps of Engineers builds flood-control dams only in urban and major agricultural areas, that costs of electricity generation have to be borne locally, that economic development in areas where dams have been built has disappointed local people and that rare and endangered plants in the state’s Natural Areas System would be destroyed by the dam. I also found out that current practice requires large initial local funding, and that the federal government pays costs of a dam only when it can be justified for flood control—which this one could not. Other dams, such as those created for recreational lakes, would require local funding of at least half the cost. In a state still untouched by economic happiness, one which cannot afford to pay for its poor or its potholes, funding for a dam would be difficult.
I also found out that since the federal government had established the park in response to earlier efforts to dam the river, it had spelled out in the first sentence of the charter that the river must remain a “free-flowing stream.” Those responsible for attempts to dam it in or above U.S. Park Service land would be taken to court by the Department of the Interior. Attempts to change the charter would not meet with favor in Congress at this time. In addition, the district Corps of Engineers, in response to local talk, had reviewed the earlier proposals to dam the river, and in light of current political and economic realities had concluded that a dam on the river was “unthinkable.”
However, some people I talked to reminded me that the politics of the pork barrel is a queer business, and that economic policies change. I also learned that the Corps of Engineers had been
forced by budget pressures to lay off personnel it could not justify, and might have an interest in keeping staffers busy with a dam proposal if there was enough public support for one.
So I met with the Free Flowin’ Citizens and told them what I had learned. The information cheered them. They wrote letters to their state and federal representatives. They began holding forth at the café and on street corners. They printed up their own petition opposing the dam and began gathering signatures.
I asked a man I knew, a forceful public speaker who did not live on the river but, who owned property on it that would have been flooded by a dam, if he would be the featured speaker at a public meeting the Free Flowin’ Citizens wanted to hold. He agreed, and the meeting was held. Public opinion had already begun to shift away from support of a dam, and the meeting saw it disappear. The Dammers brought several advocates to speak at the meeting, but they were no match for the Anti-Dam speaker, a man who has made a career both public and private of his persuasive personality. He carried the day, explaining the Free Flowin’ arguments in a winning manner; I had staged a bit of guerrilla theater, nostalgia for an old activist.
Ever since that meeting, the dam as a topic of conversation is greeted with embarrassed silence. The issue has disappeared as though it never was. In the cafe now they are talking about how hard the present cold snap is on the new calves being born in the pastures, and when I went in to buy feed today, the most fiery of the dam’s advocates wanted to show me pictures of his new baby.
SPRING
I had missed the morning weather forecast so when I stopped in at the post office I asked my friend there if he had heard one.
“Supposed to be sunny today and tomorrow,” he said, and then added, “’Course I just heard that on one of them little bitty import radios, so’s I don’t know whether to believe it or not.”
We were, all of us, rural mail carriers as much as anyone, looking for a good rain to settle the mud. This is mudtime. After a severe winter, when the ground was frozen a foot or more deep, the days suddenly have been warm and sunny and the ground has thawed quickly. The clay soil has yielded up its ice crystals to water, and in places on the back roads, which lack solid stone or gravel base, the clay has turned into something resembling chocolate pudding. We say that the bottom has gone out of the roads.
What we need is a good rain to settle the mud. I remember how strange that sounded the first year I lived here and heard it was what was required. I’m still not certain of all the chemistry involved, but a steady driving rain stabilizes the roads and turns the patches of chocolate pudding into a hard surface.
In mudtime the rural mail carriers have to skip part of their routes, and some people are as cut off as surely as if snowbound. I have been eager to get started on the spring beework, but I have to put it off until we have rain, for many of my beeyards are on the other sides of mudholes and I would not be able to drive through some of the pastures. Even my old Chevy pickup, “Press on Regardless,” with a set of mud tires on the rear wheels and weight in back for traction, would not be able to get through, although, as pickups go, it is good in mud and snow, and cheerfully wallows through places that would mire down my three-quarter-ton truck.
Except for moving some hives last autumn, I haven’t had anything to do with bees since the honey harvest at the end of summer. I had seen no weak hives that needed care during the harvest, and after that the snow asters had bloomed for so long and in such profusion that the bees made plenty of honey for themselves for the winter and did not need feeding.
Nobody but beekeepers seem to know about snow asters, and they call them by many names; frost asters, Michaelmas daisies, farewell summer, white rosemary and frostflower. Aster ericoides is the botanic name, and it describes the plant well. Aster means star and ericoides means with leaves like erica or heather. The plant, a bushy three feet or so in height, with tiny rayed blossoms like stars and fine, neat leaves, covers waste places throughout the Ozarks, blooming extravagantly from August until it is killed by a hard frost in October or November. But because snow asters are such common weeds no one but beekeepers and bees get excited about them. Beekeepers think snow asters are beautiful. The blossoms secrete a strongly scented nectar during their flowering months, and the bees gather it in such quantity that their hives reek with the odor. I have never tasted the honey, but it is dark and supposed to be strong. Because of weather conditions, the aster bloom occasionally fails, and then, even though I am very conservative about the amount of honey I take from the bees in August, I have to feed them in the autumn to get them through the winter. But last year the hives were heavy with aster honey by October, seventy-five pounds or more, and I did not have to feed.
As the weather becomes cooler in the autumn, the bees chink up every crack in their hives with propolis, a gummy resinous material they gather from buds and bark to seal out the wind and cold. If there is anything a bee hates, it is a draft. Opening a hive in the late autumn or winter breaks those seals and can harm the bees, so I try to leave them alone as much as possible in cold weather.
It has been a long time since I have been with the bees, and I miss them and wonder how they are doing. Yesterday afternoon I took a cup of coffee out behind the barn to a spot protected from the wind and drank it in the sunshine. The bees discovered me there. One settled on the back of my hand and walked daintily along my fingers to inspect the contents of my cup. Finding it unsatisfactory, she flew away. The bees are active and flying and ready to get on with the new year, and so am I. But not today and not tomorrow. Not in mudtime.
Yesterday afternoon I walked up to get the mail in rubber boots which grew heavy with caked mud before I had walked a quarter of a mile. When I reached the box I could see a truck mired in the mudhole just beyond it. Its owner, Bob, a man who lives on the other side of town, was spattered with thawed cold mud and sorely out of temper. Those of us who drive the road regularly know a detour around it, but Bob was unfamiliar with the road and had tried to drive his one-ton flatbed truck through it. By the time I got there very little of the rear wheels could still be seen, and the mud was up over the differential. A couple of neighbors and the mailman were also there helping. One neighbor with a jeep had tried to pull out Bob’s truck, but the powerful gooey mud and the weight of the truck had defeated his attempt.
Another neighbor had brought a shovel, and when I got there Bob had just started to dig. Everyone thought that if he could dig down under the differential we could pile enough rocks under it to give footing for a jack, and could then jack the truck up out of the mudhole. I helped gather rocks from the edge of the pasture next to the road. I had just dropped a load into one part of the hole when Bob shifted position to start digging in a new spot and his boot refused to follow his foot. The mud had seized it, and he stood poised, one bare pink foot in the air and a look of indecision on his face.
“She-ittttFARR!!!!” he bellowed.
“Shitfire” is an Ozark expletive, extraordinarily relieving and satisfying if correctly pronounced.
Bob grinned and squelched his naked foot down in the cold mud. We rock carriers cheered.
After a while we had enough stones in place to give a base for the jack, and Bob retrieved his mud-filled boot. He jacked up the truck, freed the differential and the neighbor’s jeep was able to pull him out.
The mailman handed me my mail. I handed him back an advertising flyer and he used it to wipe clean the mud from his hands. Then I walked home.
There was a day last winter when I badly needed springtime, and since it did not appear that spring was going to come to me I went to it. One of the good things about living here is that the lay of the land between river and creek and the steepness of the terrain create different climates and seasons all over the place.
No matter what the calendar says, a few sunbeams bring springtime to the south face of the creek hollow, and so on that sunny winter day I went there. I bundled up in insulated coveralls, insulated boots, scarf, woolen hat and two
pairs of gloves, and set off with the dogs across the snow-covered field toward the southeast to the high rocky point where the creek and the river join.
Overhead a rough-legged hawk was quartering the field, hunting in vain for mice. By the calendar’s springtime he would be in Canada on the way to his northern breeding grounds; so would the golden-crowned kinglets I discovered at the edge of the field in the cedar and pine trees. Tiny, cheerful, gray-green birds with a patch of brilliant yellow on the tops of their heads, the flock of kinglets was inspecting twigs for insect eggs with such keenness that I bothered them not at all as I stood and watched. The cold began to seep in at my feet, however, so I walked on through the woods, breaking a path in the crusty snow.
The soil is poorer and thinner here, on the narrowing strip of land sloping southward. Hardwood trees give way to scrub, grasses and, finally, at the rocky cliffs several hundred feet above the juncture, to the modest plants of a limestone glade. The view from this rocky point is spectacular, and the walk to it is one of my favorites in the winter. With the leaves off the trees, the structure of cliffs along the river and creek and the hills beyond are visible—all the foundations of this beautiful land are there to see.
Water melting from the snow above oozed through the low grasses and dripped from the cliff edge; there, in the sunshine, mosses and lichens were holding their own private but exuberant springtime. All were shades of tender, sweet and vibrant green, and several varieties of mosses were covered with fruiting bodies.
I was warm out of the wind, so I pulled off my heavy coveralls and scrambled down the cliffs to look for the blossoms of harbinger-of-spring, which should be growing in the rich soil at the creek’s edge. Erigenia bulbosa takes its genus name from the Greek ery-geneia, “early born,” Homer’s epithet for Eos, goddess of the dawn. Poking in the leaf mold at the foot of the cliffs, I found the early born, with its bulbous root and clusters of small white flowers.
A Country Year Page 13