Central Standard: A Time, a Place, a Family

THE FARM

The Farm One windy summer day during the drought of 1955, I was standing in the front yard of our farmhouse when I saw a huge red cloud approaching from the southwest. I had never seen anything like it before, and I ran inside to ask my mother what it was. She walked over to the kitchen window and said, “Oh my God, it’s a dust storm. Help me close the doors and windows.” We closed everything as fast as we could and placed wet towels on the sills to keep the dust from blowing under the windows. Then we went back into the kitchen to watch the storm advance. Unlike normal clouds, which everyone hoped would bring rain from the heavens, this massive cloud traveled along the surface of the earth, gradually engul fing everything in its path. In the town of Bloomfield two miles to the southwest, we could still see the clock tower of the Davis County Courthouse rising above the trees, but that soon faded behind the advancing cloud. Minutes later, the dust obscured Reno’s sale barn at the south edge of town. Then the trees at the top of the hill north of the Fox River disappeared. The gravel road at the south end of our lane vanished next. Finally, the cloud consumed our little house, the yard, and the barn, leaving us alone in a dry red fog. I moved over and leaned against my mother. She put her arm around me. “Don’t worry, Patrick,” she said. “It will pass.” The next morning, the Des Moines Register reported that the dust storm had originated in Oklahoma, which accounted for its redness. But this did little to calm the anxiety of farmers in southern Iowa, who feared a return to the dry conditions of the 1930s. Among those who worried most were my parents, for time had not been kind to our small farm, and it would be a sure candidate for further devastation if the drought continued another year. Fortunately, it didn’t continue. The United States government had originally sold our farm in two forty-acre parcels in 1847. Subsequently, someone bought both of these parcels and combined them into the eighty-acre farm where I later grew up. The abstract of title for the period from 1847 to 1945, the year my parents bought the farm, contains thirty-one pages. These thirty-one pagestellaninety-eight-yearstoryofsuccesses,failures,marriages, betrayals , divorces, deaths, lawsuits, foreclosures, and sheriff’s sales. By 1945, the land itself told a story of the previous ninety-eight years, and this story paid few compliments to the previous owners and tenants . In a fashion that was far too common, many of the pioneers had plowed hillsides that should never have been plowed and planted crops year after year that depleted the soil of nitrogen and other nutrients . In the mentality of these pioneers, there was, after all, always another inexpensive farm farther west. By 1945, the soil on our farm had lost its fertility and gullies scarred the hillsides, and there were no more inexpensive farms farther west. My father immediately began a program of remedial farming. On the hilly land, he sowed lespedeza and alfalfa, legumes that would restore nitrogen to that land, which he would use only for pasture. To these legumes, he added the Kentucky bluegrass that cattle crave. On the farm’s one flat field, he sowed a mixture of timothy and clover to use as hay for the Angus calves and two milk cows he would soon buy. Invariably, scattered shoots of Queen Anne’s lace grew up here and there amidst the timothy and clover, turning the meadow into one of those lovely miracles that nature sometimes grants us. For many years, my father planted no corn at all, corn being the crop that most injures soil fertility. Instead, he bought whatever corn he needed for his calves. And on every spot of ground he could reach, he spread manure that would, along with these other measures, restore the soil’s health. According to the theory of that era, this program would ultimately heal the gullies on the hillsides, and on most of the farm this theory proved successful. But on one hillside, where the gullies reached four feet deep, my father finally hired a man with a bulldozer to help the theory along. Eventually, the farm began to look more like what nature had intended , but the price my...