When I was a boy, my family had a little 160-acre farm in northwestern Ohio. It was mostly worn-out pasture, but some years we grew a little corn or soybeans. In many ways it was a pitiful place on the edge of a little Ohio farm-town trying hard to become a larger industrial town. My earliest memories were of Mom and Dad sitting around the breakfast table talking about the possibility of Cooper Tire Company building onto its tire plant. I imagine they figured that our 160 acres would be big enough, if Cooper decided to expand. It was sure as hell for sale. Whirlpool Corporation was already building on a site north of town, and Eastman Kodak was hiring for a new expansion. Our little farm had been somewhere in the family for decades but we lived in a little brick house in town, as was the case for many people in those crazy developing time. We had given up the fight when I was very young, and watching over things on the farm was an old bachelor who might or might not have been a shoestring cousin. I knew him just as Elmer, and he lived alone in the little wood-frame farmhouse in need of painting. Elmer took care of ten or eleven cows and cut a little hay, in the good years.
I was way too young to know or care about the finances that held the farm together. My father ran a ready-mix concrete business in town and was pleased by the local development that needed concrete for basements, sidewalks, and bridges for the federal interstate highway that would funnel traffic right on past us and on to Toledo, Cleveland, and Detroit. My father had no time and little interest in the abused little farm. He checked in on it only as an excuse to take his middle son out into the “country,” where I trained two barn cats to sit up and drink the warm cow’s milk as fast as it could be squirted into their mouths. There were a thousand people in the county, and a person could always find a group willing to talk about most anything, but the chatter nauseated me. People could gather in the cattle shed and kibbitz, mostly complaining about something or another. My interest in those people, all people in fact, became non-existent. I was much more interested in the land that surrounded the conversations than I was in the conversations themselves.
I have never been able to disconnect that chatter from the dirt and disrepair of that Ohio farm. As I think of those conversations, the smell of that tattered milking parlor creeps into my nostrils.
Actually, there were several memorable smells that I connect with that ancient farm. They all came to me as I sat transfixed on a three-legged stool and watched Elmer milk by hand. In later years there were milking machines but, early on, there was just Elmer’s knotty hands and the smell of the ill-kempt milking parlor that reminded me of sweet, earthy decay. The smell of that place moved in and out as I watched people come and go. At that tender age I enjoyed what I was seeing but could only take an hour so of the smell and the people. I wandered out into the seldom-used corral and sat in the fresh grasses of an Ohio summer, and the smell changed to something pleasing, and I was caught several times with my face deep in the grass. It wasn’t until much later that I even tried to separate the haff-dozen different smells of species of grasses that had, no doubt, been what lured the seventieth century farmers from the rocky pastures of New England to the flat plains of Northwestern Ohio.
At that stage of my life, I didn’t know how plants grew, or much of anything, really. I knew nothing of how farms pass from one generation to the next, or how the ownership of a piece of ground moved on paper, but I knew by the way my father and Elmer talked of the process in near whispers, that there were few things more sacred than the responsibility of stewarding the land from one overseer to the next. They sounded like they were discussing a planned jail break for a deeply loved friend. Those were the only times I can remember hearing grown-ups question the sanity of unrestrained economic growth. I’ve heard a lot more of that talk lately. I guess after you’ve spent a lifetime nursing a few thousand acres of native grass, your options are much like they were when you started: borrow enough money from a bank to buy a little herd of cattle and hope that the market holds up for the next eight or ten years, so you can make the payments, lease the pasture to a neighbor, sell out and let the next owner plow up your hard work, or sell out to a developer to stretch city limits beyond you and kill all those beautiful fields of native grass in favor of the hustle and bustle and crowds of people. The proof of this theory is obvious: Simply look at almost any small town in South Dakota.
Look along Highway 44. Those grassy places are now, suddenly, called small grain farms, with For Sale signs sprouting where green needle, wheat grass, and fescue used to grow. There might be small housing developments popping up where antelope used to raise their babies. Do you remember the bald eagles that used to roost in that old cottonwood, before the surrounding ground dwindled to cropland?
I’m nearly eighty years old and still, for me, there is no better way to spend an hour or two than sitting on an up-turned five-gallon bucket in the middle of a heathy patch of wild grass and taking in the odor of God’s greatest creation. Without looking at a calendar, with just my seventy years of trying to understand, I could likely tell you what month it is, if the wind is billowing up from the south or chiseling down from the north. The presence of the birds passes all that information to me, but I can only receive what they have to tell me if there is a patch of native grass to lure them close. I read recently that the meadow lark was extinct in Ohio. What black heart could deny a meadow lark, a bobolink or borrowing owl, from the land that had always been theirs? How many pieces of silver would it take. I remember clearly that the meadow larks of Ohio used to talk to me. It was the only chatter I could stand.
In the cafes, machine shops and church meetings they tell me that what is happening is a progression, a march of human innovation, but no one has told me where we are marching to. I might be able to look it up on my cell phone but I forgot where I left it. They tell me that all the development I see so clearly is putting us on the map. But I remember an OLD paper map, with the famous description and warning that our grandparents knew well, and ignored: The Great American Desert.
They knew that there was nothing here but grass, and they were prepared with hybrids, huge machines and chemicals, and ideas to change that. Our forefathers stood firm on this land, looked across it and imagined wonderful innovations: hundreds of houses, connected with wireless contraptions like airplanes and amazing inventions like cell phones. But my imagination could only see a few possible lives that would work for me on this land. I was fortunate that I was not bedazzled by the possibilities that some people cling to—the promise of huge families, shiny automobiles, being surrounded by beautiful people. I never had the money in my pockets to hire people to help keep everything neat and tidy—let alone go to the bank to borrow the money to buy that big green tractor and seed.
I wasn’t yet twenty years old when I first sat down on that five-gallon bucket and wracked my brain for what I really wanted out of life. I decided to stick to my needs.
I needed a couple friends to hunt and fish with. Friends who were preferably lousy shots and who talked very little. Out of my lists of things I needed came a longer list of things I didn’t need. I already had a nearly new side-by-side 20 GA shotgun and a flyrod. They came to me from my dad, who died when he was fifty-six. When I think of him, his button-down shirt soaked in sweat, the half pack of Lucky Strikes rolled in the short sleeve above an exhausted bicep, I assume the shirt was clean and crisp in the morning, but he was always long gone by six o’clock when I awoke for school. On my list of needs is a tall black and white horse named Winchester and a pair of bird dogs – Calvin and Gus. In the last few years there were a few add-ons: a couple thousand acres of native grass and a really good woman to help with the chores.
I already had a part-time job as the bird biologist with South Dakota Game and Fish, where I learn a little bit about grass and how everything that creeped or crawled, ran, slithered, or flew overhead was dependent on the health of the grass. I had heard of the concept that everything is connected, but I learned that it was more than a passing connection. Without healthy grass, there was nothing—so clearly, I had to get into a position where the grass that surrounded me was somehow under my protection. If I could make that happen, I could say no to poisoning the land with herbicides, pesticides, mechanical monsters, and developments by more people. I could let nature do what it has evolved to do, the pieces would fall into place, and I would have a perfect little heaven to spend my life. A grazing country—where humans had set some of those segments, like the national grasslands, apart—would make a good patch of ground to live beside.
Turns out, the law looks at land by dissecting it into useful segments. There are segments for growing crops, grazing, recreation, industrial development, education, and so on. In many transactions it is possible to sell off the segments you have no interest in and keep what is important to you. In my case, because I wanted a ranch that was as close as possible to what I might have found in early 1800s and I was only interested in grazing it in the most natural way possible, I was able to structure the purchase and attach easements to connect parcels so I would end up with a truly grass-ranch. We graze 100% buffalo. But that is the subject for another time.
It is all more complicated than I am making it sound, but there are people, organizations, and government agencies out there that believe that we have been beating our grasslands for generations and are happy to buy up those segments that I had no interest owning anyway. I wasn’t developing land, mining for gold, or starting a golf club. If I ever was struck by desire to do any of those things, all I had to do was sacrifice my need for peace and quiet and drive the thirty miles to Rapid City, past the hubbub of burgeoning developments, irrigation projects, and the general confusion of people trying to make their little farms into something that they never were. And never would be.
I’d like to end this little essay on a happy note. While the meadow lark is extinct in Ohio, I counted 86 on the drive between our ranch and The Dry Creek Ranch where we now gathered.
- Dan O'Brien
