When he first broke sod, my father took pride in plowing a furrow six inches deep, as straight as a string, and nearly a mile long. He started at our pasture fence, plowed straight south to the Line, turned east, plowed a few rods along the border, and turned north again to our fence, enclosing a long narrow field that in a demonic burst of non-stop work he plowed and disked and harrowed and planted to Red Fife wheat.
It was like putting money on a horse and watching him take the lead at the first turn and go on pulling away to the finish. That first summer, 1915, the wheat came up in thin rows—a miracle, really, considering that we ourselves had done it, and in so short a time. Rains came every few days, and were followed by long hot days with sixteen hours of sun. The earth steamed, things grew like plants in trick photography. We looked away from the field for a minute and looked back to find the wheat ankle high, looked away again, and back, and found it as high as our knees. Gophers mowed big swaths, cutting it to get at the tender joints, and so we went up and down the mile-long field with traps and .22’s and buckets of sweet-smelling strychnine-soaked wheat. That summer, according to the prize they gave us, my brother and I collected more gopher tails than anybody in southern Saskatchewan.
We lived an idyl of miniature savagery, small humans against rodents. Experts in dispensing death, we knew to the slightest kick and reflex the gophers’ ways of dying: knew how the eyes popped out blue as marbles when we clubbed a trapped gopher with a stake, knew how a gopher shot in the behind just as he dove into his hole would sometimes back right out again with ridiculous promptness and die in the open, knew how an unburied carcass would begin within a few hours to seethe with little black scavenger bugs, and how a big orange carrion beetle working in one could all but roll it over with the energy of his greed, and how after a few days of scavengers and sun a gas-bloated gopher had shrunk to a flattened wisp of fur.
We were as untroubled by all our slaughter as early plainsmen were by their slaughter of buffalo. In the name of the wheat we absolved ourselves of cruelty and callousness. Our justification came at the end of that first summer when my father, who was just six feet tall, walked into the field one afternoon and disappeared. The wheat overtopped and absorbed him. From a field of less than thirty acres he took more than twelve hundred bushels of Number One Northern.
It was our last triumph. The next spring my father went out early to prepare another field and plant the old one. We joined him late in June, after driving all day in a drenching downpour—load soaked, us soaked, horses streaming, old Red the cow splashing along behind with her hipbones poking up under her slicked wet hide like a chairback under a sheet. My father had barely got the crops in—thirty acres of wheat, twenty of flax. Then we sat for two weeks in the mouse-smelling shack, playing checkers and reading, while the rain continued to come down. We wondered if the seed would be washed out of the ground, it rained so. The cat prowled unhappily and lost his reputation for being house-broken, because he would not go out in the wet.
Between soakers we inspected the fields. A thin combing of green, then sturdy rows, then ankle high—it grew like weeds. Though I trapped for gophers, I caught few; they had drowned in their holes. The cat grew thin for lack of field mice. Going to the vegetable garden for our usual summer job of picking off potato bugs and piling them at the ends of the rows and burning them with kerosene, we found hardly a bug on the vines. Nothing throve on that rainy prairie but wheat and flax. Rich farmer’s sons, we grew lavish in our selection of next Christmas’s gifts from the Sears Roebuck catalog. For weeks on end water stood in the burnouts; every low spot was a slough; the rezavoy lapped the top of the dam. Like effete visitors to a summer resort area, we swam in water over our heads. We had no hot winds, no hailstorms, no twisters, no grasshoppers. Every natural pest and hazard was suspended. Except one. Rust. We got a flax crop, but no wheat at all, not a bushel. In town, where my father had planted his potato field and hired the Chinese to look after it, we had a bumper crop of spuds, so big that storage had to be found for a good part of it. Those were the potatoes that were in the cellar of Joe Knight’s hotel when it burned down.
Bad luck, surely. And yet if bad luck had not begun for us in 1916 we would simply have been a year or so longer on the hook. As it was, 1917 gave us our seed back, 1918 gave us only a little better, and 1919 served us up such blistering hot winds that we didn’t even bother to call in the threshers. One more year and we would have proved up on the homestead and been Canadians all the way instead of only halfway. But when you have stood for three summers in a row turning from the rainy east to the windy southwest, and propitiated one and cursed the other, and every time, just when you have been brought to the point of hope by good spring rains, have felt that first puff out of the southwest, hotter by far than the air around you, you are not likely to require further proofs. My father did not grow discouraged; he grew furious. When he matched himself against something he wanted a chance to win. By 1920 he was already down in Montana scouting around for some new opportunity, and we had stopped walking the paths and making our marks on the face of the prairie.
But how much of my remembering senses is imprisoned there where I would not for a thousand dollars an hour return to live! I retain, as surely as a salmon returning to its spawning grounds after six years at sea knows its native stream, and turns in unerringly from salt water, the taste and smell of the rezavoy when we swam in it among the agitated garter snakes and frogs. (Where they came from, God alone knew. There were none in that semi-desert when we built the dam, but next spring there were pollywogs. My mother firmly believed it rained them.) I could detect just as surely, if someone offered me a cup of it now, the clay-tasting, modified rezavoy water that we drank—the water from a well-hole dug eight or ten feet from shore so that the seepage from the open slough would be filtered by earth. It took a good amount of earth and earth flavors with it in passage, and it was about as full of wigglers as the rezavoy itself. In late summer we boiled it, but it never lost its taste. The water of Coteau Creek, by contrast, had a slick, soapy taste of alkali about it, and if we had to drink it for any length of time, as we did the last two summers, it gave us the trots.
There was a whole folklore of water. People said a man had to make a dipperful go as far as it would. You boiled sweet corn, say. Instead of throwing the water out, you washed the dishes in it. Then you washed your hands in it a few times. Then you strained it through a cloth into the radiator of your car, and if your car should break down you didn’t just leave the water to evaporate in its gullet, but drained it out to water the sweet peas.
We learned to drink with an eye on the dipper so as to keep from sucking down wigglers. When we went on a day’s visit to some farm and had a good clean drink out of a deep well, we made jokes that the water didn’t seem to have much body to it. All we lacked to put us into the position of the surveyors and hunters who had drunk slough water in that country in the 1870’s was a few buffalo to fill our tank with urine and excrement.
As much as we starved for a decent drink we starved for shade. No one who has not lived out on a baking flat where the summer days are eighteen hours long and the midday temperatures can go up to a hundred and five degrees has any business talking about discomfort from heat. The air crisps the skin and cracks the lips. There is not a tree for fifty miles in any direction, not even a whisker of willows, to transpire moisture into the air or shade one inch of the scorched ground. The wind that hundreds of miles to the west started up the mountains warm and wet had dropped its moisture on the heights and come down our side wrung dry—dry and gaining temperature at the rate of one degree for every four hundred feet of altitude lost. It hits the Plains and comes across Alberta and Saskatchewan like the breath of a blowtorch. There is no cloud, not one, to cut off the sun and relieve the glare even for a minute. The horizons crawl with mirages. Maybe, far back along the crest of the mountains, out of the straining sight of Plains dwellers as far east as ourselves, there may lie the pearly bank called
the Chinook Arch, but that would be no comfort to us even if we could see it—only a confirmation of the foehn wind.
Searing wind, scorching sky, tormented and heat-warped light, and not a tree. The band of shade thrown by the shack narrows as the sun climbs, until at noon it is gone. It will be two hours before it is wide enough on the other side to shelter a boy’s body. There is no refuge except inside. The green blinds are drawn, the canvas flaps are rolled down over the screens of the sleeping porch; the light is dusky and comforting to the eyes. But the still air is hotter, if anything, than that outside. Outside, the wind dries sweat before it ever bubbles through the little wells of the pores; inside we are sticky and labor for breath. The wind bellies the canvas in the porch, leaks past. Driven from the still heat of the shack, we look out the door into the white glare of the yard and the hallucinatory writhing of the horizon, and are driven back in again.
On such a day my mother would not try to cook anything on the Florence kerosene stove. She would have milk, butter, eggs, anything perishable, down in the semi-cool hole under the trapdoor in the floor, down among the spiders. Bacon, ham, dried beef, about the only meats we can use because they are the only ones that will keep more than a day, are buried deep in a box of oats to keep them cooler and moister. Hung in the air they would grow rancid, be blown by the flies, harden like rock. During the hot-wind days the gingersnaps that are our standard cookies are so dry and hard they fly into fragments when we take a bite; if they should grow soft we would take it as an almost certain sign of coming rain.
At meal time the trapdoor is raised and up come crocks of tepid milk, often “on the turn,” and the dish of butter. We dine, these days, primarily on homemade bread and butter, sometimes with peanut butter, sometimes with brown sugar, sometimes with a slather of Karo syrup or molasses. But eating, ordinarily our purest pleasure, is no fun. There is a headachy crankiness around the table, the flies are infuriating. Before it has been on the table five minutes, the butter is ghee, yellow liquid that we scoop up with spoons to spread our bread. Put down into the hole again, it will harden into a flat, whitish, untasty-looking sheet sprinkled with a rime of salt like an alkali flat. When spread, it is coarse and crumbly, without buttery consistency and with a rancid taste. Sometimes, in spite of the twists of flypaper hanging in a dozen places from the ceiling, and the big treacherous sheets spread around on tables and boxes, all of them murmurous with trapped flies, we will find in the melted-and-congealed-again butter a black kinked leg or a transparent wing.
And what of the insects caught in that heat-softened, incredibly sticky flypaper? I used to watch for minutes at a time as some fly, gummed and stuck with glue, his wings plastered to his body, his legs fused, dragged himself with super-fly effort toward the edge of a sheet, and made it, and rested there, slimed with the death he had dragged with him, and then tried with his stuck-together forefeet to wipe his head and clean himself. A fly could often drag himself a good way through the warmed glue, but even if he made it to the edge he didn’t have a chance. I used to put pencil circles around some struggler still hopefully mopping his head with his slimed feet, and come back later to see if he had got clean and got away. He never had. Once I caught my mother watching me, and together, for a while, we stared at the sheet of gummed paper loud with the buzzing of flies whose feet were caught but whose wings were still free. We watched a few get their wings caught too, so they could only slide and crawl. My mother’s lips drew up as if she tasted something nasty. “What’s the matter, sorry for the old flies?” I said. “It’s a parable,” she said, and crumpled the sheet up and stuck it in the sheep-wagon stove we used in chilly weather.
A parable, indeed. In spite of my mother’s flimsy pretense that we were farmers of the kind her Iowa parents were, drawing our full sustenance from the soil and tending the soil as good husbandmen should; in spite of her cow and her dasher churn and her cloths of cottage cheese dripping from the clothesline; in spite of her chickens and eggs and vegetable garden, she was not fooled. It was not a farm, and we were not farmers, but wheat miners, and trapped ones at that. We had flown in carelessly, looking for something, and got ourselves stuck. The only question now was how to get free.
She knew it was failure we were living; and if she did not realize, then or ever, that it was more than family failure, that it was the failure of a system and a dream, she knew the family failure better than any of us. Given her choice in the matter, she might have elected to go on farming—get some better land somewhere, maybe in the Cypress Hills, and become one of the stickers. She had the character and the skills for it as my father did not. But she likewise had impulses toward a richer and more rewarding life, and ambitions for her sons, and she must have understood that compared to what a Saskatchewan homesteader considered his opportunity, five years of Siberian exile would have been a relatively comfortable outing. She had gone to school only through the sixth grade. It would never have occurred to her to think that her family and thousands of others had been betrayed by homestead laws totally inapplicable on the arid Plains; or that she and hers had been victimized by the folklore of hope. She had not education enough to know that the mass impulse that had started her parents from Ulvik on the Hardanger Fjord, and started her and my father from Iowa into Dakota and on across the border, had lost its legitimacy beyond the hundredth meridian. She knew nothing about minimal annual rainfall, distribution of precipitation, isohyetal lines. All she knew was that we were trapped and licked, and it would not have helped her much to be told that this was where a mass human movement dwindled to its end.
For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it—could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?
There may be as good ways to understand the shape and intensity of the dream that peopled the continent, but this seems to me one good one. How does one know in his bones what this continent has meant to Western man unless he has, though briefly and in the midst of failure, belatedly and in the wrong place, made trails and paths on an untouched country and built human living places, however transitory, at the edge of a field that he helped break from prairie sod? How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?
One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course. He may lack a thousand things that the rest of the world takes for granted, and because his experience is belated he may feel like an anachronism all his life. But he will know one thing about what it means to be an American, because he has known the raw continent, and not as tourist but as denizen. Some of the beauty, the innocence, and the callousness must stick to him, and some of the regret. The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world. And that is true even if the Eden is, as mine was, almost unmitigated discomfort and deprivation.
I saw the homestead just once af
ter we left it to go back into town in the bitter fall of 1919. In the spring of 1920 we came past it on our way to Montana and camped in the shack for one night. We did not even take the boards off the windows or roll up the canvas blinds, but went about in the familiar, musty place, breathing the heavy air, in a kind of somnambulism. Our visit was not meant to change anything, or restore for an instant the hope we had given up. We merely passed through, picked up a few objects that we wanted, touched things with our hands in a reminding way, stood looking from the doorway down across the coulee. My brother and I walked up the pasture and saw where a badger had been busy, but did not get out our traps. Our pasture fence was banked high as the posts with tumbleweed blown in from the next farm, two miles west. Our own fields were growing, in addition to spears of volunteer wheat, a solid mat of Russian thistle that by fall would be bounding and rolling eastward ahead of the frolic winds, to scatter their seed broadcast and lodge eventually in someone else’s fences. The gophers that our wheat had allowed to increase prodigiously, and that our traps and poison had kept artificially in check, would thrive a year or two on whatever wheat volunteered in old fields, and then shrink gradually back to a population in balance with the hawks, owls, coyotes, badgers, and weasels that lived on them. And our house would begin—had already begun—its process of weathering and rusting and blowing away.