Reaching Down

Reaching Down Julene Bair In the dream, I'm stooping in tumbleweeds that have drifted against the pre-fab tin garage south of our house. It's summer, and I have that dual perspective common to dreams, in which I can see as I normally do while also seeing behind me. Over my shoulder, the close-napped buffalo grass pasture stretches toward the low place we called the lagoon. The prickly pear is in bloom, the flowers yellow and waxen, and the blossoms of delicate apricot mallow totter in the wind above dusty green leaves. The lagoon is filled with water. I reach down in the weeds along the garage s foundation, attempting to retrieve something that has blown there, or something that has been lost. I'm looking for a normally inconsequential thing, discarded or dropped. I'm not sure what it is, but the search is freighted with importance and I persist despite the thorns. Waking, I often check my hands for scratches. The eeriness of finding none recalls the emptiness ofthat childhood landscape. I could always feel the presence of people there, who seemed to have simply vanished. Now I understand this feeling derived ofmy family's history in that place. The ghosts ofa clan watched over our enterprise. Many ofthe clan members still lived, residing in town or on nearby farms. On occasional holidays, this family would manifest itself. We would have big dinners in the big house built by my grandfather, my mother's father. But no gathering fingers as vividly in my memory as the one we had at that lagoon, the week of my tenth birthday. The get-together was an odd outbreak of civilization, a half mile from the farmstead. It was as if we'd been dropped, in all the nakedness of our personalities and dress, onto the plains from which we drew our life and breath. It was May 1959, and a couple mornings previous I had awakened to a thrumming, voluminous chorus of toad song. The chanting pulsated, hoarse and male, and seemed to echo off the dome of the sky. Apparently, 80 Julene Bair81 the far off lightning Dad and I had watched from the balcony the night before had moved over us while I slept, bringing rain. Then the toads had come, appearing from nowhere. In the morning, I opened the screen door and stepped onto the porch. Looking southeast, the direction of the noise, I saw that the lagoon had filled with water. Mom came out the door behind me. "Listen to those silly toads!" she exclaimed, happy and amazed. "Was it a gully washer?" I asked. "No. It was just a nice big rain. Didn't you hear the thunder?" I'd heard nothing, and the lightning the night before had given me only the vaguest premonition. Distant electrical storms had become a common sight on those dry evenings, nothing more than the arid planet's tossed off electrical charge. In a rare moment of spontaneity, my parents decided to celebrate my birthday with a party at the lagoon. Birthdays normally went by without too much fanfare—a gift, of course, and a cake shared by the family—but the annual party my son and all his friends consider their due would have seemed indulgent in that time and place. The neighbors and our family remember the lagoon party still today—not because of a little advance in the life of a girl, but because it marked the end ofa drought.Years later, my father would tell me that the late '50s were worse than the '30s. Farming methods had improved, and we avoided another Dust Bowl. But livestock was sold offand crops withered. Apparently we had some pretty close financial calls, but my parents must have reserved their worried discussions for well after my bedtime , for it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized the times were dire. So here are these drylanders, a people whose skin, speech, mien, and humor are so arid you'd think ifyou cut them, sand would pour out. Here are these drylanders wading through the mud at the edge of the lagoon . Normally the valley...