High Plains Tango (23 page)

“Still, I remember what things used to be like when I was a boy out here in what at one time was called the West River Country. ’Specially I remember Saturday nights. The farmers and ranchers would come to town, make a stop at the local produce house to sell eggs or a few chickens for pocket money, then proceed along the street for groceries and haircuts and hardware and what-have-you. We used to call it daughter-and-egg night, since that’s mostly what the farmers brought to Salamander.

“The town band would be playing in the little gazebo down at the park, and people would buy popcorn from the red, white, and blue wagon there, munching away while they listened to ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and other favorites. Kids’d be running around, old folks’d be talking, and in between was the complicated dance eventually leading to new family formation.

“All the while, however, the clock was ticking and the interest on our note was piling up, though none of us was aware of that. We just took it for granted that things would go on forever in a more or less happy fashion, only getting a little better over time through the miracles of agricultural chemistry and improved farm implements.

“With the band playing its version of ‘Gary Owen,’ which was Custer’s old marching song, and the melodious hum of Main Street on Saturday nights, things seemed pretty good. We didn’t have any idea the tallyman was coming toward us. He was lean and tough and gaunt in the face, but he was a long ways off, and we couldn’t make him out yet.

“Understand, mister, this is triple-hard country. That’s for sure. Thin soil, short grass, and scarce water. The early mapmakers didn’t call this area the Great American Desert for no reason at all. Without the dreams of empire, it probably wouldn’t have ever been settled. But the federal government picked up the flag of Manifest Destiny where the horse soldiers dropped it and handed it off to various fast guys who flipped it around, showing everybody the Jolly Roger on its backside.

“The feds stayed in the game, however, giving us land under various congressional acts, along with subsidies for high-priced irrigation systems and for crops that already were in a condition of surplus. Naturally, being bribed to do something, people tend to do it. And being encouraged to drain aquifers that take maybe a hundred years or more to get filled up again has a tendency to leave the aquifers empty after a time. Similar thing happens with soil when you let it blow away in the wind or wash into the rivers through bad farming practices and overgrazing. Problem is, there’s some fundamental law at work when it comes to water and soil. It goes like this: When it’s gone, there ain’t no more, at least for a long while.

“A professor from an eastern college came out for a visit and said, ‘It’s all over, folks.’ Told us, given what had been done to the land and water, we had maybe thirty years left, no more.

“He proposed turning this part of the Union into something called a ‘buffalo commons,’ the idea being that the feds ought to resettle people out of here, let the towns other than those along main highways just go back to nature, and populate the place with buffalo and other critters that could do a better job of managing the place than humans.

“Personally, I thought it was a pretty good idea. Of course, not everyone felt that way, and some of the boys threatened to
resettle the professor
if he didn’t get his smart ass back to wherever his league of ivy was located. Bobby Eakins called the professor a head-egg and said all them thinkers were crazier’n shit. Bobby said he himself had been driving around the countryside in his Blazer and plenty of water was gushing from the irrigation systems.

“But the plain truth was that we’d used up the water, pretty well mangled the soil, and generally had caused a shower of destruction on the place. Still, the money from U.S. taxpayers kept on coming to us, for which we were sort of grateful and sort of embarrassed, all at the same time. Everybody knew these subsidies were nothing more than money doled out to people to keep ’em doing what they were doing when our beloved market system said they ought to stop doing what they’re doing. Naturally, we objected to that way of thinking about it, since it sort of smelled like welfare, and we got short fuses out here about welfare chiselers and government interference in general. So we kind of disguise all of this through the use of terms like
agricultural programs
and
farm policy.
”

I halted the old man’s historical lecture while I turned over the recording tape. He went to the bathroom and returned with two fresh cups of coffee.

“I always have myself a good chuckle,” he said, “at the debates in Congress over agricultural programs and the arguments involving what they like to call ‘saving the family farm.’ That creates kinda warm, fuzzy pictures in the minds of urbanites. You know, Gramps by the woodstove, chickens pecking around the barnyard, square dancing in the Town Hall on Friday nights, lemonade on the porch swing, the last refuge of old-time values, including something referred to as the
real
America.

“Actually, to my way of thinking, we’re in the manufacturing business out here and have been for a long time. Pittsburgh makes steel, Seattle builds airplanes, we manufacture grain and meat. No difference between what we do and, say, oil refining or Detroit’s assembly lines. Just visit any big cattle operation or the packing plant over in Falls City and watch ’em shred animals to pieces if you got any doubts about that. Axel Looker, for example, owned two thousand acres and rented another thousand. Axel didn’t have no chickens pecking around his barnyard. Matter of fact, Axel didn’t have no barnyard.

“What he did have was a new prefabbed ranch-style house, some prefabbed metal sheds for his big equipment, and a small forest of prefabbed silver MFS grain bins so he could store his grain and sell it at just the right time. And Axel wasn’t worried, because if grain prices didn’t get to where he wanted ‘em, he just backed down and let the government take it off his hands. If prices did go up, however, he wasn’t obliged to share any excess profits with other taxpayers.

“By the way, Axel’s wife bought their eggs and frying chickens over in Livermore at the Piggly Wiggly, instead of locally at Webster’s Jack and Jill. While she was shopping, Axel would be downtown, checking in at the brokerage office to see how the futures markets were doing. The Farm Bureau in particular doesn’t like to talk about those things, preferring the Hollywood version of the lonely struggling farmer against the greedy banker, all the while the bureau’s supporting programs driving the last few real family farmers and small towns to the wall.

“Along with farming and ranching, we’re also in the resource extraction business in a funny kind of way. It seems to me that extraction is when you take something out and don’t put anything back. So we’ve been using both soil and water at a clip far exceeding their natural replacement rates. That is, we’re sort of in the mining business as a by-product of our main activities. In this case, we’re mining soil and water. Not too much worry about that, however, ’cause if the soil and water problems got too bad, we were all pretty certain the U.S. taxpayers would want to bail us out to save the family farm, even though we caused the problems in the first place.

“Fortunately, we’ve been pretty good at hiding all of that up until the last few years when some outsiders began asking rather pointed questions about our viability out here. Our congresspersons, however, have been real effective at selling the rest of America on the idea of preserving a bucolic life that don’t exist anymore, maybe never did. It’s a highly useful myth that’s turned into an outright lie.

“Along with that bad news are all the other things that’ve been working against the Salamanders of the world. With agriculture getting bigger and bigger, due partly to the generosity of Congress and their flows of money out here, there are less country folks to produce kids and buy things. People of childbearing age leave, except for a few, and if you ain’t got enough kids, you ain’t got schools. And if you lose your schools, you’ve ripped out the heart of the community. The few remaining kids ride yellow buses long distances to endure what passes for education in these United States. So contrary to popular belief, the money just oozing its way out here don’t help the small towns at all, just the big landowners and the big agribusiness firms. It just seems to go on and on, and it don’t ever get better, only worse.

“Every so often one or two of the retail people in Salamander would make a try at stirring us up. The young woman who took over the variety store in ’76 was that way. She formed a development group, pushing ideas that seemed pretty alien to the locals. Even got some advisers from down at the university to come up here, study things, and make recommendations.

“And, boy, the townspeople thought those professors were really queer geese. One argued in favor of what he called ‘bootstrapping our way up,’ which was like talking a foreign language to most of us. It went completely against the advice we’d been receiving from the governor and his economic geniuses, all of ’em hoping Salamander might attract a big meat-packing plant or, better yet, a laser research facility.

“Problem is, industry ain’t too excited about coming to a place where there’s no labor force, a decrepit sewer system, and a declining water supply. Executives take one look at Salamander’s golf course with its sunburnt greens and rattlesnakes, which I mentioned before, and they choose something a little spiffier.

“Anyway, Charlene Lorenzen struggled with her variety store, while the locals were shopping at the Falls City Wal-Mart, and tried to get us all foamed up about making Salamander into what she called ‘a place where people will want to come and live.’ I admit she had some interesting ideas.

“For example, since you can buy a house in Salamander for almost nothing, she suggested we provide a haven for struggling artists and writers. They’d pay their rent by giving lessons to all the locals and generally creating a more intellectual and artistic feel in the community. The boys at the elevator and over at Leroy’s had fun with that, saying the only thing worth painting around here was Alma Hickman’s cheeks and yellow stripes on the highway.

“Charlene talked about some other ways of getting things going, such as building a new sewer system and redoing our municipal water supply. But when it came to raising taxes a little to pay for them, nobody was interested. One problem with having a town full of older folks, though I’m generalizing a bit here, is that they’re not inclined to make investments in a future they’re going to miss.

“One of the economics professors who came calling at Charlene’s invitation made a lot of sense to me. He said Salamander was not going to attract major industry and pursuing that particular course of action was a waste of time. Instead, he argued we should get into what he called ‘vest-pocket manufacturing.’ Said all we had to do was visit some of the industries in Falls City or other such centers of economic excellence and see what two or three of us might produce in the way of subcomponents for the larger products being manufactured there. Said that producing a high-quality product at a reasonable price was a no-fail strategy every time. He pointed out that every new job in Salamander was a major addition and that we didn’t need all that many new jobs to keep Salamander going.

“He also said we needed to decide what kind of place we wanted to be and then work toward that. To those accustomed to government largesse and laissez-faire, all at the same time, that seemed awfully managerial. One possibility he offered, which went along with what Charlene was thinking, was simply to define Salamander as a bedroom community, kind of a suburb, for Livermore and Falls City and then work on making it the best possible place to live and raise a family.

“Among other things, he suggested the local implement dealer ought to move all his rusty combines off vacant lots on Main Street, since that detracted from the appearance of the place. That was an unfortunate suggestion and got him on the shit list of not only the implement dealer, but also the many folks here apparently seeing rusty farm machinery as objects of beauty. That’s the only reason I can figure out why they dump ’em in ravines on their farms, so they can have a pleasant evening’s stroll down to look at the 1942 hay rake lying there on its side.

“The professor’s list of things to try seemed endless to those who saw none. He kept saying, ‘You don’t have to be fancy, you just have to see the possibilities.’ Most of us had trouble with that second part, but we were polite to him during the free noon meal at Clyde Archer Legion Post 641 and wished him a safe trip back to the university.

“After a while, Charlene got kind of tired of people telling her that every new idea she or somebody else suggested wouldn’t work in Salamander. You could see it in her face. Finally, she sold off her remaining stock at bargain prices and closed her variety store. Last I heard, she was operating a home-decorating shop in Falls City and doing real well.

“In any case, talk on the street and at all the local gathering places was about the new highway. U.S. Representative Larkin held a press conference in the Legion Hall where he extolled the virtues of concrete and traffic and economic development along with its sidekick known as progress. He even mumbled about how maybe the highway could bring about a reopening of the mines over in Leadville.

“Looking out at a fairly grim horizon, then, the only hope the residents of Eble Olson’s town could see was the proposed interstate highway. It wasn’t ever made quite clear just how the road would benefit Salamander, but all the experts said it would, leaving the exact nature of those benefits to our own fertile imaginations.

“For a while, Carlisle and one Mr. Moore, a professor over at the community college, plus a group of outsiders interested in hawks and their well-being, stopped the highway dead by filing a lawsuit to halt construction while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was trying to figure out whether or not to list the T-hawks as endangered, since they was almost extinct. In spite of our collective intent to destroy virtually everything in the name of improved shopping malls and other features of the good life, it seems some do-gooders, long of hair and bereft of love for their country, got some laws passed years ago saying you couldn’t destroy the habitat of animals if their species was near to passing into oblivion.