No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life

Epilogue: Waiting for the Storm

Epilogue: Waiting for the Storm Middle of July. Ninety degrees. No breeze. Perfect haying weather said my father as we leaned on the pickup passing a jug of water back and forth. The burlap cover I’d soaked at sunrise was dry, the water warm. Fifty feet above us, green and yellow leaves rustled in the sun, flung cottonwood shadows. We stared westward, toward the Black Hills trying to foretell the weather. He told me how his dad came west in ninety-nine with all those other Swedes and Germans, settled down near Battle Creek, began to learn how this Dakota country differed from the flat black lands they’d left in Iowa, where they’d paid their immigration fare by working for their cousins. With teams and slips they carved out shallow trenches snaking toward the creek bank from their fields; cautiously, they shaped them so that only when a storm dumped rain the channel couldn’t carry did the irrigation work. Instead of roaring through the fences, 204 Nn n o p la c e li ke h ome ripping off the sod, floods dribbled into spreader ditches, soaking through their fields, waiting for tomorrow’s seeds. For years, until the Dirty Thirties, the rains that flooded Battle Creek spilled gently into ditch and field. The settlers prospered, learned American, saved their money, married local women, and voted every chance they got. The prairie wind spread every seed it caught; saplings sprouted everywhere along the stream. Each trunk grew straight those first good years, up twenty feet or so. Then, shouldered by prevailing winds and stunted by the drought, they all began to bend, to lean into a gentle curve. Wind conspired with hail and snow and time against them. Each tree now genuflects from north to south a row of arcs as even as the outline of a bridge. “They look like little old ladies going to town,” my father said, grinning. “All stooping in a row.” We watched a cloud bank rise beyond the Hills, growing blacker as it towered toward the sun. The old trees bent their backs, tattered women hustling toward shelter, tipping toward the earth. We laughed together; he was forty-six and I was twelve. Blackbirds shrieked and billowed from the field, clattering toward the streamside willows. The air went still. Before the cloud had covered half the sky, we felt a puff out of the south, the land inhaling, summoning the storm. We climbed inside the truck and headed home. As I strained to close the gate, rain splattered on my shoulders. The new hay lay in windrows that would shed the water. When the field dried out, Epilogue Nn 205 we’d be back to finish what we’d started. Maybe we’d find water in the spreader ditches. Let’s see now, that’s been forty-five years last July. Some of these old trees must be a hundred. Their stooping line still charts the ditch route, but I seldom see it flow now. Too many houses lie upstream, too many sewer lines drain to the creek. One or two dead cottonwoods have fallen; the rest are shaky, showing whitened trunks. My neighbor, granddaughter of a frugal pioneer, cuts the dead for firewood—but irrigates her garden from the creek, water pumped with no permit. I pat the nearest tree, feel how the bark is ridged, wrinkled by her years, corrugated by her age. Just like my skin. My dad was pretty bent himself before he died; my mother’s curled into a comma. Wheeling down the halls, she holds herself above the earth as best she can, but not for long. I straighten up and pat the tree’s old puckered hide once more. A cloud is rising grim above the hills, a storm that some of us won’t weather through. ...