BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 90

2010

JUAN

His father, he bets, is proud. But he wouldn't say so, Juan knows.

He remembers his first day at the Site job, a year ago now. His first bus ride from the Moreland stop out to the desert facilities. Beaming now, he was beaming more then, having perceived himself on a trip into a future planned decades before. They have passed the last farm ground. The road stretches before them, buses from the night shift passing, commuters too proud to take buses passing them, too.

He worked the acreage outside the window as a child, first picking rock and then moving pipe. His father did far more, broke it out of sagebrush one shrub at a time with a machete. A trace of him remains, Juan imagines the paths he took, afoot and sweating, beyond blister and into callous, probably tick-ridden and dodging rattlesnakes.

Fifty years ago his childhood home, one of them, anyway, was just a half mile from where the desert started, where no more land could be farmed. Juan remembers talking to his father, who often spoke of the Site as if it were Oz, one day at a field's edge as they were moving a line of pipe from one side of the field to the other. Juan said he was going to work there one day. His father had cuffed him. "You learn to work first," he said. "No big dreams. No big talk. Work."

I was such a smart ass, Juan thought, amused. I needed that.

Dad, he told him at his last birthday, you were right and you were wrong. Big dreams, wrong. Work, right.

A month ago Juan moved from landscaping labor to being part of the anthropology crew. And a week ago, sweeping the Site grounds for metal artifacts—an 800,000 acre project expected to take years—he found what turned out to be an old settler wagon. His detector picked up the metal fasteners that held a wooden tongue and frame together. As instructed, he didn't move anything, just painstakingly uncovered some of the wooden pieces that had been buried—according to preliminary guesses by his boss—by a century and a half of wind, snow and rain. And worms, he was told. Insects and worms can add two-thirds of an inch a year to the soil. That can't be true here, Juan had thought, doing the multiplication, but he didn't say so. Keep your mouth shut, his father had said. He listens to his father's advice much more now.

After he had uncovered some wood, its grayed surface and grainy texture revealed, he marked his find and drove in to tell the bosses, who quickly took over, sending him onto the next square mile to run the detector. The work, even on bad weather days, reminds him of roaming the desert as a child, whether alone or with friends, searching through nooks and crannies, following tongues of lava and slivers of soil, investigating lava pockets, finding snakes and scraping lichen from rocks. Paradise re-found.

He has a new house, just finished a few months ago. Mr. Yamada came to the door soon after it was built with a house warming gift—a selection of meats and cheeses, plus a gift certificate to the fancy restaurant in town—and another one that meant far more: Yamada had cut out a chunk of an old boxcar and framed it, attached a card that said "from little things to big ones: congratulations on coming so far."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston