BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 65

1980

DAVID

The authorities finally figured out, after eighty years of forewarning, that only wishful thinking is of infinite supply, so they're considering a moratorium on new agricultural well permits. The acreage David is plowing may be the last ground to be broken out of sagebrush—a final illustration of the perfect crop rotation: ten thousand years of sagebrush and a year of spuds.

No power lines come out this far—and won't, at least for irrigation. Horst's new pivot will circle using a massive diesel engine to draw water from three hundred feet below. On one hundred twenty-eight acres, minus whatever rock piles turn out to be unfarmable.

David drops to the lowest gear and idles back, seeing rocks. Often they are just loose rather than connected to ledges—"big ash," Horst calls it, dropped by Big Southern eruptions hundreds of thousands of years ago. This particular area is exactly that, its rocks just big ash, the plow moving smoothly through the soil and burying the hard obstructions.

The field is as perfect a basin as probability allows, its shape and size an almost exact fit for a standard circle system. The perimeters, being subject to nature and not the civil engineer, don't quite conform to geometry, though. They are ragged, some places reaching outward like fingers that make David want to unnecessarily plow just a little further, some drawing back, retreating from the encroaching lavas.

A mellowness characterizes the soil, David feels it—as if the plow were, like a cane to a blind man, an extension of his senses. The top inch possesses a sponginess, sometimes peels like a fragile rind, a result of millennia of vegetative and geologic action, of cyanobacteria working a chlorophyll-inspired magic. Beneath the top layer, the aged remnants of similar action reside, of a different quality now but still having a more yielding texture than ground he's accustomed to working—acreages tired from fifty years of mechanical annoyance.

Aptly named "Big Butte Ranch", Horst's land sits at the desert's edge, the last farm before BLM ground. Every northward pass of the plow gives David a view of the Big Southern. In certain light, on clear days, when the snow reflects into the sky without the dust of spring fieldwork or the smoke of summer fires, the Butte looms near and threatening, but the rest of the year the sky is often tinted with haze that occludes its imposing character. Right now it hovers somewhere in between, neither friend nor foe.

Two thousand acres, if you add Horst's acreages up, cut into the landscape jigsaw-like, each parcel surrounded by cheatgrass and sage. Rabbitbrush and the scores of other native plant species take their turns appearing, too, dependent on the timing of rains and the collection of winter snow. Then there are the insects that feed on those plants—last year the government outfitted B-52 bombers with spray units to kill grasshoppers, the planes flying in formation low enough to simulate war. Aphids, army words, Colorado potato beetles do their damage, too, along with that of the animals whose numbers fluctuate with the weather and available desert feed—jackrabbits and antelope, primarily. Add untimely frosts, occasional fires, hail storms, excessive wind and aridity to the array of difficulties and you summarize Horst's situation. He likes a good fight, he says, so picked a place with plenty of challenges.

On the lee side of rock piles, sand and debris has blown in on prevailing winds, creating a thicker topsoil and yielding to the plow without hindrance. But windward upslopes require gearing down to a crawl in order to avoid breakage. David, enamored by the curling action of soil coming off the mouldboard plow—it mimics a surfer's wave—, often looks behind to watch the soil turn, his furrow thus snaking out and in due to his distraction.

David's brother-in-law John Johansson rents this section of Horst's ground; they have a symbiotic relationship echoed elsewhere—between Bob Thompson and Horst, Lyle Youngstrom and Horst, Tom Strohschein and Horst, Elgin and Horst and John—through land leasing, harvest sharing, and information exchange (in addition to bouts of coffee drinking in the morning and varying degrees of beer drinking in the nighttime). Two miles to the northeast John rents another farm. Close as that Engleson farm is, to get to it from here with anything other than a horse or a sacrificial vehicle you have to take a circuitous route of twenty miles.

A rocky tongue of the desert separates the two farms, an area the county deems unnecessary to cross. But cattle can be moved between the pieces on horseback or three-wheelers, so John plants turnips in the fall for Horst's cattle to forage on. On a still, frosty morning the turnip field hangs rank with cow farts, an amusement the first time you encounter it and an old, tired joke after that. They imagine finding the cattle all dead some still morning, a cloud of methane hanging close to the ground—a "bovine Jonestown," his co-worker Kindall once quipped.

Engleson's might be the toughest piece of ground in the county that anyone farms. Large areas refuse a plow, the topsoil layer being so thin that the mouldboards chatter as they scrape underlying rock. A disc succeeds at tillage but brings up rocks like they were a crop themselves—the place still producing them after decades of work.

The story goes that a polygamist's wife filed on the ground in the teens. Dry farming was being promoted and there was an inkling that a canal might be built to encompass her acreage and a million adjoining. But the polygamist Johnsons gave up along with the other dry farmers. The land sat idle, taken for taxes, until sprinkler irrigation arrived.

The ground came into John's purview as a favor to his accountant, the current owner who, like a succession of those before him, thought he'd snagged a deal. It roughly fits John's holdings, being near a rented half-section four miles away and another half he purchased two miles further to the northeast. A lava tongue separates those farms, too—settlers harvested cedars from it but you won't find a single tree now.

The sole home in sight of Engleson's belongs to an odd family—stranded, the tractor two-way radio out of commission, David once walked the half mile to their house to use the phone, and when a young girl answered the door a two-hundred pound pig ran out. David was agog but it was an everyday occurrence to her, he could tell. They have a few milk cows, a herd of pigs outside, and raise a little hay. Their stack sits along Engleson's fence.

When David was fallowing the ground last year, the acreage set aside for a government payment, the same girl appeared at the stack. Each round of the field he made found her with one less piece of clothing. When she was down to a skimpy swimming suit—or her underwear, David couldn't tell—he re-routed his work to the furthest part of the field nearly a mile away.

He sympathized with her, knowing how it was growing up distant from civilization, but her father had shot out the pipe-moving tractor's tire months before, retaliating for a run-over hog. He frequently cut the fence, considered the desert to be his grazing land. So, David didn't fulfill what wishes she might have had, considering the possible repercussions.

A pickup truck comes over the lip of the basin. A fertilizer spreader follows behind it and a feeder truck right after it. The vehicles pull off by the field and wait for David to come to the end. He sees that Cal Metz, everyone's least favorite fieldman, stands and waits, the spreader driver parking his unit on the edge to prepare to be filled for the consequent application.

When David gets out of the tractor, Metz's jeer rises above the sound of the idled engine, "I thought you were never going to go back to farming." He turns to the spreader driver, "'I ain't never going to farm again' he said, 'mark my words'." Metz's overblown imitation of David's words, despite its farcicality, hits close to the mark. His laugh reeks with ridicule. David has no adequate answer, just absorbs the intended blow.

The feeder truck driver's impatience, no doubt practiced, rescues him. "Where do you want us to set up, Cal?" he asks. The spreader driver, a Walther brother closely aligned, both financially and character-wise, with Metz, grins savagely at David. "Just can't get away, can you?" He'd like to see a tussle, even if just a verbal one.

"If this isn't in the way, how about right here? Just pull off the entrance road." Metz tells the driver, then turns to David. "It alright if we start? You'll be done by this evening, won't you?"

"Fine with me."

The fertilizer crew makes haste to begin, the truck filling the spreader with a conveyer that springs off from the rear of the bed. David returns to plowing with one eye on the fertilizer operation.

The poison of the short exchange with Metz stays with him. Metz's manner is just one example of a background suffering and annoyance he's been retreating from since high school. A kind of jock mentality, a chicken coop of pecking males asserting dominance. The spreader zooms up and down the field where he's already plowed, covering sixty feet at a time with his speeding rig. He'll catch up to David at the rate he is speeding, probably within two or three hours, but David can only go so fast.

In the monotony he's calculated he'll have driven 180 miles before he's done with this field. Around and around and around. Tack on another hundred when he disks, another two hundred when he marks rows. Multiply that by six or seven fields. Add six hundred for cultivating potatoes, about the same for 1400 acres of grain when he sprays. And harvest? Another six hundred digging spuds, call it the same for grain since the passes are wider. Oh, and swathing barley, there's a couple hundred more miles.

Not to mention the eight hundred miles a day in a truck for two weeks bringing seed potatoes or the two hundred miles a day for a month driving wheat to the granaries or town. And then there's the commuting time, from David's place to the homeplace and from there to the various farms. And the trips to town for parts.

The motion gets to him. A kind of erosion takes place. It contributes, he thinks, to the process he's imbedded in. A process Metz refers to—correctly, David hates to admit—without even knowing the particulars. David's obviously a stereotype Metz has already seen.

When the driving finally stops in the fall, work done and stillness returned, rather than continue to move and make his leave from the area, from his context, David instead basks in motion's absence. It's a mistake. Forgetfulness comes, or at least he quits remembering. He ceases being reminded of work's unpleasantness, and without the driving discomfort he goes inert, finds his own pace, gets to a place of ease. And the next thing he knows, it's spring, he's out of money, he needs work, the only work available is the farm.

And hence, here he is. Again.

©2025 Ralph Thurston