The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  Then the one thing I hadn’t considered hit me.

  “No!” I yelled into the deafness surrounding me. “What have I done?” The linebackers would not have any use for grass.

  V

  THE OGALLALA ROAD

  Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  1

  I SAT IN THE HALLWAY OF AN OLD DORMITORY, ON A CAMPUS THAT WAS ONCE A SEMINARY, IN CAÑON CITY, COLORADO. It was 2008, two years after we’d sold the farm. The organizers of the Buddhist retreat had placed wooden chairs outside three doors. Behind the doors, the teachers were granting private interviews. I was next in line for Terry. I’d chosen her because she was the only female teacher and because, when students asked questions after dharma talks, waves of empathetic emotion crossed her face, like the shadows of clouds sailing over the prairie.

  I expected Terry to be in the lotus posture she had amazingly held throughout the previous day and a half of the retreat. But now she sat like a normal sixty-year-old, in a stuffed vinyl chair. She had long gray-blond hair and a welcoming presence.

  How was the retreat going for me? Did I have any problems meditating for long periods, she asked.

  No, other than I tended to get sleepy.

  “That’s not uncommon,” Terry said. “Go take a nap if you need to. Sometimes people come here from working nonstop.”

  “That’s me,” I said. “I’ve been writing a book for what seems like forever.”

  “What is your book about?”

  “At first it was about the Ogallala Aquifer, the water under the Great Plains. But it turned out it was about more than that. My family. And this man I fell in love with who lived back there. Except he broke up with me, and then we sold our family farm. And I discovered that’s what I’d been writing about all along.”

  “Selling the farm?”

  “Yes. It was up to my brother and me to save it. I mean, this has nothing to do with the dharma or anything, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about when I’m supposed to be meditating.”

  “Is your father still living?”

  She does have a way, I thought. “He died . . . ten, no, eleven years ago now. I haven’t quite come to terms with selling his farm. It’s all he ever did. The retreat is helping, though. So thank you.”

  I was prepared to leave, but Terry’s eyes kept me pinned. “I know it’s just attachment and ego,” I added, in an effort to be a good meditation student.

  “It’s okay to feel the pain,” Terry said. “You’re grieving a loss.”

  A warm sheet of tears filled my eyes. “It’s hard to, I mean—”

  Terry probed on. “Do you feel as if you sold your father when you sold the farm?”

  A tsunami rose in my chest.

  “Forgive yourself,” Terry said.

  The tsunami broke. I hadn’t let myself cry this openly in front of anyone since Clark died—my face contorted, mouth open, lips down-stretched.

  “Would he want you to feel bad?” Terry asked.

  I could barely breathe, let alone answer. I grabbed a tissue from the strategically located box.

  “He just wanted to share all he had with you,” Terry said. “He wanted you to have his connection to the land.”

  Dabbing my eyes with the tissue, I said, “I’m not so sure about that part.”

  “No? Do you want to meditate on it for a minute?”

  I sat up straight, assumed the posture, shoulders straight, feet planted parallel, hands on thighs.

  Connected to the land. I tried that phrase out on the dad in memory, the dad who presided perennially in my psyche. His face turned red and he smirked with embarrassment and disdain, his hypertuned schmaltz detector going off.

  No, we kids weren’t supposed to hang on to our land because we were connected to it. We were supposed to hang on to it because it was real estate. It was real. The price might go up. It might go down. But it would always be there.

  Cash would slip through our fingers. Stocks would crash. We would end up like Uncle Leonard in his decrepit trailer house with its weather-warped plywood porch on the edge of Goodland; or Aunt Ruth in her purple-and-yellow basement house; or Uncle Johnny, who had to come home and work for Dad because he lost all of his money investing in city real estate; or Uncle Raymond, who was ending his days in a VA home in South Dakota.

  Broke, struggling for the rest of our lives to make ends meet.

  Dad’s parents and Mom’s parents had managed to hold on through the thirties drought. Some said that the fifties drought had been even worse. And then along came Bruce and I, who sold in a wet year.

  Then the other shoe dropped, as Dad liked to say. The government mandate on ethanol had caused the price of corn to triple. Land values tracked grain prices like a bird dog tracks scents. If we’d waited until now to sell, we could have gotten more than two times what we’d sold for. I imagined the three linebackers smirking. They had foreseen this.

  At closing, they had sat across from Mom and me in the bank’s green-carpeted room, three hulks who’d probably grown up on tractors and who’d given their dad what he wanted most, sons who farmed. And farmed. And farmed. I asked them flat out. “Are you going to plow that grass in the west pasture?”

  The oldest one, the Harold in their clan, answered. “We paid dry cropland prices for it, so yes, we’re going to farm it.” Hell, yes, we are, he probably thought. Who does she think she is even asking? They didn’t graze cattle themselves, apparently. They bought cattle off other people’s grass and finished them in their feedlot.

  They’d even planted all of the wheat ground to corn, Bruce said. Plus all of the irrigation circles. They must be using our water rights to the hilt. They must—

  Terry touched my knee.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Did you have any insights?”

  “It was the connection to the land thing. Dad would never have used a phrase like that.”

  I watched her absorb this. She said, “He did have a connection, though.”

  I nodded. “Yes, but he didn’t know it.”

  “So do you. You just have it in a different way.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m not so sure anymore.”

  • • •

  AFTER THE SALE, I BECAME A LOST soul without a construct. There were actually two constructs, and they’d always been in opposition—the conscious one of ourselves as landowners and our unconscious connection to the land.

  On the Carlson farm, we’d all been part of a tapestry, a weave. There were animals and grains, vegetables and prairie, trees and people, play and work, mud and stars, the scents of manure and of flowers. I choose these things at random and it doesn’t matter what order I list them in. A specific list of the “ten thousand things,” to use a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, would fill many pages. They were all entangled, of a piece.

  But when we traded that farm and moved to town, then when I left Kansas altogether, I became a lone thread. While I was trying to weave myself back into the natural world, in the mountains and deserts of California, my family’s relationship with our land back home was continuing to unravel. Dad drove to it every day. He didn’t live on it. Its meaning had shifted from the seat of our family’s life to solely a source of revenue. Dad’s success growing crops still affirmed and satisfied him, but his land had become more of a thing to him, and to us. It had become a financial asset, not who we were. It is no mistake that we use the same word in English to denote both financial worth and a moral principle we hold dear. In one line of reasoning, I actually obeyed my father’s value system by violating his first precept. I thought selling was the best financial decision.

  Today, farmland prices have tripled, a greater rise than my father saw in his lifetime. Woul
d I sell again at triple the price? If I didn’t share ownership and the decision were entirely up to me? Would I sell? Even if I knew the grass would be plowed and more of the water would be used? What bothers me more, the profits I missed out on or how our land is now being farmed? Could I have found a way to farm it sustainably that wouldn’t have led to financial disaster and without having to give up the rest of my life? Should I have given up the rest of my life?

  • • •

  THERE ARE PEOPLE FOR WHOM CHOOSING TO farm is not a choice between doing right by the land and giving up the rest of their lives. For these people farming is their life. If it had been that way for me, then I never could have brought myself to sell.

  My search for a way to meaningfully contribute, now that I no longer owned land, brought me to a book called Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Farms, Food, and Fertility Matter. The book’s author, Woody Tasch, suggested that instead of chasing fast “hockey stick” growth of their assets, investors might want to emulate earthworms, and put their money to work aerating and providing nutrients to the soil of the new food economy. We don’t have to keep sending our money into distant, invisible portfolios, while wondering why Main Street is dying, our food is irradiated, and geneticists in China are breeding square apples. After underlining that and much else, I closed the book thinking, That’s what I want to be! An earthworm investor.

  I finagled a press pass to a national Slow Money gathering in San Francisco, where I attended pitches by farmers, growers of grass-fed beef, innovative distributors of organic and locally grown food, and dozens of inspiring entrepreneurs. These ranged from the owner of a Point Reyes, California, compost company that recycles manure from dairies, “closing the loop on poop,” to a pair of young Seattle women who are repurposing shipping containers into grocery stores for “food deserts,” those neighborhoods where you couldn’t buy a carrot if your life depended on it. Which it might, the only option in those places being a steady diet of McDonald’s or other brands of fat.

  On returning home, I joined with some Coloradans I’d met at the conference to form our own Slow Money investment club. We have made two loans so far, one to a distributor of locally grown, mostly organic food and another to a company that grows vegetables in space-saving, aeroponic towers, which use water rather than soil to transfer nutrients to the plants. The company harvests the vegetables when they are still seedlings. Microgreens, they are called.

  This type of investment does not come without risk. Last year the two community activists who spearheaded the investment club asked me to join with a few others in the group to help the region’s largest organic farm stay in business. The farm had sold five thousand CSA, or community-supported agriculture, shares. In this arrangement, members help finance crops by paying in advance for weekly deliveries later, during the growing season. The vegetables and fruits had always come reliably in the past, March to November, rhubarb to rutabaga. But due to poor recent management, the farm was now on the verge of bankruptcy. They needed a large one-year loan in order to ensure delivery to those customers and to the many supermarkets that had added organics thanks to the reliability of this particular supplier. An investment partnership had been formed and a new experienced agricultural manager was now in charge, but no one could promise we would get our money back.

  Woody Tasch argues that in order to build a saner food system, we will have to become “return agnostics” for a while. We’ve seen recent proof that the stock market is not that dependable either. And just think about the environmentally harmful and inhumane ways many stock-market profits are generated. That investment model originated and evolved when we had not become aware of planetary limits.

  Hmm. No or little gain, possibly even a complete loss, helping a local organic farm stay in business versus investing in further environmental and social collapse. If I made this decision the way my father had farmed, with my focus solely on the bottom line, I would follow his tractor up and over that dream hill, ever the slave to his will and vision.

  We lent them the money. At the end of the year the company entered bankruptcy proceedings and the investment partners had to take over farming operations, so we all had little choice but to re-up. I may never recoup my investment. But I don’t feel nearly as bad about the decision to make that loan as I did about land values tripling after selling the farm. Because this time, instead of selling out of what I could no longer stand behind, I had bought into what I believed.

  2

  I DON’T KNOW WHY I HAVE TO DO THIS EACH TIME I COME HERE. After driving around for half an hour, leaving tracks in the snow up and down the cemetery, I spot them, and almost wish I hadn’t. So . . . stonelike in their finality. BAIR. BAIR. No other words on this, the grave side of the stones, except at the bottom of Mom and Dad’s, it says Parents of Clark - Bruce - Julene. On Clark’s, Mom went all out, having his picture etched into the granite. He’s doing what he’ll be doing for the next however many hundreds of years, until some future civilization decides it wants the stone for another purpose. Dressed in his lab coat, he’s pouring liquid from one test tube into another. The photo was taken when he still had a beard and most of his hair.

  The surnames on the surrounding stones are the old family names, most of them associated with a section or more of land someplace in the county. The map that hangs in the registrar of deeds office over at the courthouse still has our name on it, but only because Bruce and I held back from the sale a half section of Conservation Reserve Program land that was too hilly to farm.

  Our disappearance, by and large, from that map doesn’t bother me as much as it has over the six years since the sale because on this visit home I’ve seen some heartening things. On a farm about halfway between Goodland and what was once our farm, I met Sherman County’s largest organic farmer. Just having to use the superlative form of the adjective, alone, is amazing. There is more than one!

  Yesterday, I sat in Stan and Becky Purvis’s kitchen and heard Stan’s story of growing up on the farm with one brother. They both wanted to come back, but their parents didn’t have enough land to support three, or even two, families. Stan tried to farm anyway, but in the early nineties, after his dad called him an “environmental wacko” for experimenting with organic grains, he bought a truck and began a career hauling grain for others. Ten years later he was hauling a load of wheat to a Front Range mill for some Mennonites from the county south of ours when a number on the computer screen inside the scale house caught his eye. “Is that what you’re paying for this wheat?” he asked. The guy inside said yes. Stan knew what he was going to be doing from then on.

  It seemed fitting that he got his start in organic farming by following the Mennonites’ lead. Kansas’s early Mennonite settlers brought winter wheat to this country in the first place. They emigrated from the Russian steppes, where the climate and soils were very similar, and the wheat thrived here. Hard, red winter wheat. I’d heard the phrase since earliest childhood, when the market grain announcers on the radio spoke so fast the words blurred together. Kansas City barley upapenny at three-twunny-three, sorghum’s holding steady at two-eight-dee-nine. Hardredwinterwheat offanickel. The Mennonites never stopped raising it the old way, without chemicals.

  Stan’s uncle helped him purchase some family land that his great-grandfather had homesteaded in 1886. He now received two to three times the price conventional growers did for not only his wheat but also everything from white corn to millet. The profits had made a convert even out of his dad, who let him take over his land when he retired. Stan now farmed fifteen hundred acres organically. This was a lot for an organic operation, but not by plains conventional standards.

  “Conventional agriculture is all about bigger equaling better,” he said. “That has cost a lot of young farmers the ability to get in the game.” For him, going with organics and not expanding beyond his ability to keep up with the crops, which do demand more cultivation and t
ime, had been a way to stay on the farm. That was as philosophical as Stan got. He wasn’t like the young farmers I’ve met along the Front Range who want to grow healthier food while building the soil, although when I mentioned earthworms—the real kind, not investors—he did affirm that his neighbors’ soil probably had next to none, while he had plenty. And he was proud of that.

  The wind blows stinging snow at my face, making me glad that I’m wearing my sunglasses. I usually want to rip them off here, to enjoy the colors in their pure form. I am bundled in my down coat and wool mittens over wool gloves, but my bottom half is cold already. On the back side of the stone, Clark is still doing his triathlete thing—swimming, biking, running.

  And Dad still has his stalk of wheat. Mom has an iris.

  What are you doing out here on a day like this?

  Coming to see you, Mom. What’d you think?

  Why didn’t you wait for a nicer day?

  I couldn’t, Mom. Remember? I don’t live here anymore.

  Oh. Well, I still think you’re crazy. I wouldn’t be caught dead going out on a day like this.

  There are many things I want to tell her. But it’s too friggin’ cold out. Look, Mom, I brought you some flowers. Daffodils.

  It’s crazy putting flowers out in this weather.

  They’re fake, Mom.

  Well I know that.

  I wanted to buy something better suited for winter, but there wasn’t much choice at Walmart. I’ve been in town two days and already I’ve had to go out there three times. A whole town under a metal roof. There’s Twila’s, I think as I walk past the fabric section. There’re four clothing stores. There’s the shoe store. There’re all three groceries—Safeway, Bogarts, and the IGA.