BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 44

JUNE 1956

DANIEL

Daniel compares what he sees—the crops going in, the sagebrush areas nearly gone—to John Garrison's words as he lectured at M.I.T. sixty years prior. "It's a young country, a place for the young and adventurous," Garrison had said, before pausing and scanning the graduates, his gaze seemingly meeting each member of the audience. "For you." Not quite Horace Greeley, still Garrison and fellow surveyor Hugh Fleming echoed Greeley's sentiment of "go west, young man" as they encouraged them to take their degrees to the mines and irrigation projects of the western territories. And so Daniel had left the east and its crowded ways, left his family and their staid behaviors, for the young country.

He suspects this acreage, here, some of it losing its agricultural virginity to the onset of the sprinkler age, some of it on its second go round after the dry farmers abandoned it decades before, is experiencing the last boom time. No untouched land would remain. But he could be wrong. He didn't foresee electricity or the consequent sprinkler systems, so he likely can't imagine the next wave of technology, either. It wouldn't be new if you could see it coming.

He had foreseen the desert's greening, however, though his vision was as askew as a Greek oracle's dream—its gist on target, its specifics akilter, just enough truth in it to avoid dismissal. Sprinklers could be viewed as a shadowy culmination of his and others' earlier plans a half-century prior, its intention identical but its technique updated to fit the age: utilize underground water pumped from an aquifer instead of a canal system drawing from the Snake.

Daniel had designed and promoted—but failed to convince government officials to adopt—a canal system watering this tract, but the Reclamation Bureau's monies went to building a dam and reservoir instead. Two plus decades later, the electricity generated at that dam now made these irrigation systems possible, the power company erecting lines as fast as they can ship in poles to do so. Demand for electricity to run pumps is soaring and homestead claims, along with purchases of foreclosed lands vacant since the Depression Era (and the dry farm failures a decade before that), completely smother the county map.

Iris keeps his coffee cup half full, empty enough so his tremors cause less spillage. At home, he can place a towel behind his neck, tie one end to his drinking hand and pull with the other, for some reason the tremors stopping when the guiding force comes from a distance. It's too embarrassing to perform the same feat here, though, so he fights every sip, trying to catch a moment when the ghost inside him stills, then hurrying to drink before it wakes.

The area now under development is nearly identical to what would have been irrigated with either his proposed High Line Canal or the Dubois Project considered decades before, when the Carey Act was passed. It would be identical, that is, except for eight hundred thousand acres sequestered by the government for military and nuclear research. There would not be any farming there in the foreseeable future. Another big difference: sprinklers, unlike furrow irrigation, ignore elevation. They water high spots as well as low, so more efficiently cover space. A ditch, on the other hand, uses only gravity, and Blossom silently touts the method—silently because he doesn't want to be seen as an old man clinging to old ways. It's bad enough experiencing one's own decline without seeing others witnessing it, too.

But Mother Nature provides gravity free of charge, after all, that can't be argued with, while sprinklers require a vast array of technology—turbines at the dam, thousands of miles of transmission lines crossing the land, pumps, aluminum mainlines and quarter mile hand lines to deliver the water. The new method is wasteful of resources, by Daniel's standards, and he admits that, coming from conservative stock and having been through times requiring frugality, his experience might taint his opinion.

But at some point in the future, Daniel knows, at a time bound to be too late, his appraisal will be realized. The aquifer will give out and farmers will act surprised, though already the water commissioner warns of that inevitability. He is a brave man, in Daniel's mind, battling the purveyors of magic, and may end up a martyr and lose his job.

There is precedent. The over-appropriation of water from the Snake was recognized years after settlers first banked their dreams, with resultant court battles. The rush to suck water from below ground will enter the legal system at some future date, too. No resource is infinite, despite promises otherwise, something anyone scanning this desert, any desert, should automatically understand.

The Rising River Cafe's famous chokecherry-maple pie isn't the big draw for him as it is for others, but it does cut the coffee's bitterness. He shouldn't be eating sweets, anyway, the doctor says it contributes to not just his weight but his eye problems. He's half through it and he picks at the rest, for it serves mostly as an hourglass of sorts. As an excuse for his extended presence, its demise is a timer to signal his departure.

He doesn't come every day, as he alternates his morning rounds with Pete and A's in Blackfoot and even the Chuck Wagon in Aberdeen when he has the energy to drive the extra forty miles. But he comes often enough that Iris considers him a regular and so fills him in on gossip—waitresses, like secretaries, act as funnels of information for their clienteles. Nora provided that service until they split, after which their exchanges became precise bullets of information, each accompanied by the shrapnel of regret.

The cafe faces easterly, toward the highway, but sits high enough that from the parking lot you can view the desert, now farm ground, for dozens of miles to the west, the Big Southern Butte evident on clear days. He marvels at the Butte each time he comes and again when he leaves, for even now that his eyesight blurs every line—his vision's black, empty spot forcing him to cock his head to gain perspective—it stands imposingly as a warning of some sort or alternatively as a beacon, a kind of talisman to hold to.

Down the counter Horst's German accent, still fully evident after five years in the country, dances around the waitress. Daniel can't tell if he's flirting with Iris or just teasing, his age annihilating the ability to discern matters of lust or love. That ability wasn't so good when he was younger, either, he thinks, recalling his cluelessness in matters of the heart. He doesn't know whether to wince or to chuckle.

Horst's eyes are as blue as the winter sky here on its clearest day, are mesmerizing, almost glaring, and along with his blonde hair betrays that Aryanness Hitler sought—but didn't exemplify—to quarantine in his nation as precious. Daniel last heard Horst's distinct Germanic accent about 1920, when the languages of a dozen other nationalities filled the Blackfoot streets as thickly as the noise of peepers, crickets and frogs accompanying the river at dusk. A good many of the dry farmers at Taber were Volga Germans, he recalls, having emigrated from Russia before the Revolution.

Horst's presence at the cafe this morning coincides with that of the son-in-law of the New York family who have set up in Blackfoot as an outpost for their potato shipping business back east. Glen Yamada is here, too. With his four brothers and other Japanese they farm fully half of the newly opened ground here—thousands of acres. Yamadas have their own cafe just a couple miles to the west, primarily for the five families and their help but open to all. The Japanese farmers stop in at both cafes, knowing that secluding themselves makes them targets as much as showing up too often does. World War II, after all, is barely a decade past. No one, save Daniel, seems to notice the irony of the Japanese and German presence here—if you threw in the significant number of Pingree's Italians you would have the reunion of the Axis powers. It's a good thing Grace Peck's father isn't still around, he'd be throwing a fit and drumming up a mob.

Horst openly admits he is out to poach labor for the upcoming farm year. His Aberdeen sources having failed him, he's making rounds through the valley for summer help, either by outright theft or by getting tips through the Mexican grapevine—every illegal has family or acquaintances somewhere looking for work. His farm, bordering Bureau of Land Management ground, boasts of being the northernmost farmable acreage from Aberdeen and at the same time the westernmost from Springfield, hence the name "Big Butte Ranch". It may be just fifteen miles from here as the crow flies but since no other roads exist, save rudimentary trails across the lavas and through treacherously knolled desert areas, it's roughly sixty miles distant by highway. Daniel is a nodding acquaintance of Horst's (everyone who encounters Horst is), and through eavesdropping he knows a little bit of his history. Iris conveniently passed on the rest of what he knows.

Jerry Scheid, a sheepman who grazes near the Butte, sponsored Horst's entry to the U.S. He was desperate for help after his Peruvian herder, just turned fifty, died of a heart attack at his camp trailer. Horst, barely twenty, jumped at the chance to leave war torn Germany, worked for a couple years before serving in the U.S. Army and getting stationed, irony of ironies, back in Wiesbaden, not far from his hometown—the government considered his German fluency to be an asset.

That military stint made citizenship easy to get, and Scheid's familiarity with properties near his grazing allotment gave Horst an insider's knowledge of foreclosed and abandoned acreages. When he picked up his first Big Butte parcel, he hauled hundred pound wheat sacks in the trunk of his car out to the field in order to plant, and since has scraped, scrambled and scavenged, growing his acreage each year by pouring work and profits into purchasing more ground and equipment.

"I guess none of you Japs is going to help a Kraut out," he says, addressing Glen Yamada and Ken Ugaki. They grin quietly, flying beneath the radar—who knows what they are thinking, whether they are offended or glad to be sharing camaraderie. Third generation Americans, their English is perfect but those unacquainted with them might think they didn't speak it, they are so quiet. The five Yamadas take turns, if Daniel's guess is right, getting a break from farming, since their work habits, bordering on obsessive, wouldn't allow them frequent off-time. Horst turns to Daniel. "I guess I have to go over to Taber and steal some of Simplot's guys," he says. "Mr. Blossom, would you like to go for a ride?"

Getting few such offers, he accedes, grateful for any sudden aberration in a day among days. "Drink up!" Horst says and they down their coffees, dismount from their stools, and depart, Horst tossing enough cash on the counter to buy everyone's coffee. "It's about time you paid for a round," Glen yells, out of character. "You cheap Kraut."

"Consider it a partial payment on the Marshall Plan," Horst retorts.

If Daniel could have hired Japanese help on the Skeen canal, their timeline would have shortened considerably, but the Carey Act was a product of anti-Asian times—it expressly forbade hiring them. His first night in Blackfoot, Daniel ate at a Japanese restaurant, when there were enough railroad workers and beet field laborers to keep the establishment busy. Over the years he watched them, as a people, move from thinning and harvesting beets to farming a third of the sugar company's acreage. Their impoverished state in the oughts inspired contempt, their later success in the teens inspired resentment—they couldn't win; until just recently they were barred from purchasing land.

They take the direct route westward toward Taber, a brutal road compared to the longer, paved route south and then west. Their path roughly follows where the Highline would have run—the surveyed route skirted the high ground in such a way as to maximize irrigable land. On the downslope immediate from the cafe, they pass the boxcar village that houses Mexican help. Daniel's attention spans the valley, his weak eyes marveling at the way sagebrush became wheat, beets and potatoes, a few fields of alfalfa interspersing those crops. His vision turns fencelines into wavy blurs, the shades of color lack precision but gain effect. It's not exactly what he envisioned, his heart leans toward the beauty of flood irrigated fields in their variations, but it is an impressive transformation. The geometric view that reaches to the horizon, one of squares and rectangles broken only by the slash of a highway and an adjoining set of train tracks, looks one way through his degenerating eyes, but he imagines it copying in some way the nature of the era much as his earlier imagined outcome would have captured its—high, unirrigable knolls left as outposts of a time when only the native Shoshones lived here, with a corresponding set of animal and plant life.

The beet fields have been worked and seeded, weeks ago, are nearly ready for cultivation and a subsequent thinning by labor crews—high school kids, family members, Mexicans, Navajos, anyone who wants a job. Most of the grain is planted, too, the winter wheat covering the soil and the spring grain emerged but its drilled rows interspersed with bare ground, looking like corduroy in Daniel's distorting eyes. A few late farmers straggle toward the end of the planting season, overly burdened or underfunded, while others have traded grain equipment for potato machinery. Horst's crops likely run a little later, given his microclimate of cold desert nights, giving him time to scout for the pipe movers he will soon need. He remarks on the straightness of some of the potato rows. "Must be Germans," he elaborates, lighting a cigarette.

Their arms resting on the window frames, Horst's wing window open to make flicking ashes easier, they attend to the fields' layouts, feel the breeze nearing the level of uncomfortable heat. "Those Japanese can farm," he remarks, extending his arm southward. He is referring to the Aoyagi's place, which adjoins the Tominagas, their mailboxes marked with their names and their yards immaculate, equipment lined up and the area weed-free.

Daniel calculates the labor need for sprinklers on over a hundred thousand acres and comes up with a thousand pipe movers. That would be all the high school boys and some of the girls, if they all would do the work. But that leaves no workers in the school months of April and May, late August, September and October. Hence the need for migrants, a need here in the county since as long as he's been here, farming being so seasonal in nature. Haying season. Potato harvest. Threshing time. Beet thinning.

They drive for another ten miles, reach the labor camp. Sixteen boxcars, three cinderblock buildings that serve as community bathrooms. Children scamper when they see Horst's truck at a quarter mile away, warned about the Immigracion and thinking themselves invisible from that distance.

***

Simplot's cellar, holding a quarter million sacks and the biggest in the world according to the old blowhard, first comes into view and the boxcar village that services it and his farm operation appears a couple miles later. Once off the pavement and across the adjacent Mackay Branch tracks, Horst pulls into the communal bathroom side of the makeshift town, which straddles the Springfied-Taber road. "I won't be long," he tells Daniel as he opens the pickup door.

Young children with buckets of water emerge from the cinder block units and two Mexican women carry loads of laundry. The men who live here, mostly single, are in the fields. Daniel watches Horst knock on a boxcar door, the image a blur but discernible. The door opens, Horst gesticulates, his active arms indicating something but Daniel can't say what. A trail of dust comes off the road to the south toward them, signaling an approaching vehicle, a rare event much of the year but less so during planting and harvest times.

He hears the word "immigracion" shouted and sees the children drop their buckets and run. The women pick up their pace to almost a run, cross the road and disappear. Daniel, too stiff in his age to turn and watch, moves the rear view mirror so he can see across to the bigger part of the village, but the images are vague and blurry. What he doesn't see: a light green van pulls up behind Horst's pickup, blocking any possible retreat; the van's door opens before the dust clears and a man jumps out with a revolver pulled; he wears a bulletproof vest and comes toward the truck.

Daniel hears Horst's voice, calm and unconcerned, his German accent evident, "You want to see my papers?" Daniel does see Horst approach, smiling jovially, undaunted. Behind him, shouts arise, obviously orders but distant enough he can't tell what exactly they are, whether they are in English or Spanish. He catches movement underneath a boxcar, near enough that he spots the young boy inching backwards. Their eyes meet, Daniel thinks. He winks and puts one finger to his lips, and the boy's teeth flash a momentary grin, visible even to Daniel, before he disappears beneath the boxcar.

The agent has dropped his revolver into an unthreatening posture. "Not funny, Horst," he says. "I'm not going to ask why you're here, I can guess that."

"I think you're going to leave empty handed today," Horst replies. "I am. Unless you want to chase them out in the fields."

Daniel's eyes flash to the rearview mirror, sees a mass of movement, does not see that two agents follow a group of women, guns at their side and their arms shooing them as if they were cattle. Several children, mixed in with the women, skip along, the youngest holding their mothers' hands. One has a baby in her arms, swaddled in a blanket. The agents herd their catch into the van. "We're done here," the agent yells.

"I hear Mexican women are feisty," Horst says. "You'd better be careful or they might get the drop on you."

The agent isn't amused. "We'll be watching you," he tells Horst. "We know where your place is."

"If you're looking for women," Horst replies, "There's a bar in Blackfoot I know where you might have more luck. There's a mobile unit comes out, too, I hear."

"Funny. Very funny. The men will come in when they know we've apprehended their wives."

Horst whistles. "And they say Hitler was a bastard," he says.

The agent's glare is palpable for a moment. "We can take you in. Is that what you want?" Horst declines.

Daniel hears the van behind them start up, watches it back up and leave, heading back toward Blackfoot. When it's out of sight, Horst goes over to the boxcar where the boy is hiding and says something in Spanish. Two small hands come into view, Horst reaches down and grabs them, tugs without reward at first but then, with greater exertion, pulls the boy free. He dusts him off, converses with him, then returns to the truck. The boy smiles at Daniel and then runs past the pickup to the other side of the village.

"I'd better get you back," Horst says when he gets in. "A lot of excitement for an old man, don't want any casualties on my conscience."

"You're just lucky they know you," Daniel says, "Or with your accent you'd be in that van, too."

"They know better than to tangle with a Kraut." Horst laughs. "That was a smart boy," he says.

"What about his mom?" Daniel asks.

"Lucky her, she was out delivering lunches in the field." Horst shifts up a gear and the pickup judders. "Lucky me, they'll be glad to come work for me. Immigration knows this place too well, it's too easy pickings."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston