Farm Collective Memory

Sometimes the sun sets more than once in a day.
Just the other day, while walking on the prairie, heading west into the late-evening sun, I saw a glint in the light. This jogged my memory, and for a moment, I was five hundred miles to the south on another prairie, another day, standing in a flimsy wooden shack built over a dugout out on an endless level plain, facing a wind I could never have imagined. The wooden slats stammered around me, the framework groaned, the shingles sliced away, the door flew off the hinges, the windows opened wide, like a mouth, howling, stripped of the rags that had been burned for fuel long ago. The wind ripped across the bare earth, spitting dirt and fragments of brittle blonde grass, screaming like a man who had just lost his wife.
In every direction were fields turned by the plow, raked with furrows, and not a leaf in sight. It was a sketch in charcoal. There were more shacks in the distance, all shedding pieces of wood and glass in the wind. To the north, in the distance, was a black wall, no, a black cloud, roiling across the plains, tumbling like a freight train that jumped the tracks. Tumbling in my direction. It was two hundred feet tall, maybe more. But there was no rain in this cloud; the smell of wet earth and grass was not in the air. A deep breath was countered with a punishing cough. Nothing but dust. Sheets of it were swept up ahead of the cloud. Then clumps of soil. Then stones. The wind hurled them at the shack, hundreds at once, a continuous barrage. I heard a bang and turned my head to see the door bounding away. No sooner I glanced back and the cloud was across the yard and it came so swiftly that I hadn't the time to cover my face. It was upon me, turning midday to midnight, absorbing the light and air, swelling my clothes with plumes of black earth, sandblasting my skin. I ducked down, buried my head in my arm, and pressed my eyes shut, wincing as I heard debris slam against the walls of the shack. The sound of pots, buckets, fenceposts, birds, sheet metal, licence plates, dinner plates, ledgers, bonnets, shovels, milk cans, windmills, housecats, rain barrels, telephone wire, chickens, and a Bible. I think I heard a woman cry.
This went on for hours. The dirt poured in between the slats, filling the dugout like black snow, forming a drift as high as the roof. I struggled to breathe. I dug into the ground to make an air pocket. My hand fumbled upon an object, about the size of a child’s fist, square, it felt like glass. I don’t recall what happened after that.
The next day, the winds subsided and at last, I was able to tunnel out. I stood on the prairie, bathed in sunlight. Dunes of dirt could be seen all the way to the horizon, it was a black Sahara. A meadowlark called - the voice sounded like a question. I had no idea. I felt the object in my shirt pocket. I pulled it out and held it up to the sun. It was clear glass, it glinted in the sunlight. It was an inkwell. I turned and looked at the scattered remains of the shack. Why, it had been an old schoolhouse.
Now, decades later, on a prairie to the north, perhaps the very prairie that coughed up the soil for that dust storm, I stood looking to the west and I saw that glint again. I stooped to look. Same shape, same glass. It was another inkwell. My throat felt dry. I looked around for a dugout. There it was to the south, about twenty yards away. I cleared my throat. Same boards, same windows. It was another schoolhouse. It stood in the middle of a plowed field. The furrows were deep, the clods as big as boulders. The field continued into the distance where it met another plowed field which continued on until it met another plowed field, which met another plowed field, then another field, then another two or three, I could not tell, and then the horizon took over. A breeze swept up from a swale and rattled the dry grass. I picked a blade and it turned to powder between my fingers. I looked up. The sun had dropped out of sight. Soon, it would be dark again. I had to hurry, I had to go down.
I know I could not possibly remember all I that I had seen years before - but I thought, it is darker still when I don't remember what I had never known.

The Center of the Universe

The other night, while looking up at the sky filled with stars, I think I saw something move.
The experts tell me that there is a lot of majestic chaos up there, with galaxies colliding, stars exploding, wobbly planets, rampant radiation, flares, dust storms, gas bags, and those sinister black holes lurking in the shadows, ready to chomp down on everything that passes their way, swallowing it whole, digesting it, then vomiting it out into a make-believe world devoid of time and space, where everything becomes once upon a time and far far away, but I am not talking about that.
What I mean is, there are some things we take for granted, like the sunrise, the sound of birds, or the sunny side of the moon. What would it be like if one day the moon rose above the horizon and presented a new look? Instead of that tarnished silver face, suppose it waxed green, displaying a visage of pestilence, pocked with pustules, a death mask, feverish with pox - just the way I was told it would appear someday - in those terrifying nursery rhymes I was forced to read as a child. What then? I suppose markets would crash, armies would disband, politicians would bow their heads, clerics would cover their faces in shame. We could only hope.
My aunt and uncle lived in the state of New Jersey. They had a dog named Prince. I saw him when I was in first grade. He was a big collie. I could reach out and hug him around the neck. I did not visit them for another ten years, not until I had reached the eleventh grade. I stepped into their house and a dog came running up. A small shaggy dog about knee high. My aunt said, "Oh don't mind Prince."
I said, "No. That's not Prince."
She said, "Yes it is."
"No. It can't be."
"Yes, it is."
I coughed, "Who pulled the plug and let him out?"
I was stunned, he looked like a small scale replica of the original, something you pulled out of a box and glued together and put up on the bookcase. Was he shrinking all these years I was away? Were they feeding him? Was he disassembled? Was I going mad? That night I had a very bad dream upstairs in my cousin's bedroom. Perhaps.
If you take something for granted, you won't pay attention. If you don't pay attention, you don't notice things change.
So there, above me are the heavens, the big fireworks factory torched by arsonists, the spilled bag of gold and silver coins, the silent war movie. And as chaotic as it appears, it is not chaos. Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. Chaos describes knowledge beyond our grasp, the ignorant man's thesis, a dismissive slur. But in reality, everything is on schedule and on track. Split second precision, sub-meter accuracy, fully synchronized. Law abiding matter. These are highly trained rocks! So why would anyone with breeding higher than that of an organ-grinder prostrate himself to these dim-witted balls of ice fire and rock? It is beyond me. Might as well worship the mail service. That alarm clock you set last night. The one-eyed cat that shows up on the front step each morning begging for a dish of milk.

And all of the sudden, there was a shift.
At first I thought I lost my footing. But I was standing still, leaning up against a White pine in our front yard. Then I thought it must have been an earth tremor and my position on the planet moved a foot or two. But everything was still, nothing swayed. That is when I noticed everything had set back in the sky, slipping to the east several degrees, almost as if time had lurched backward a half hour. The moon fell down behind the trees. Everything moved, the planets, the stars, and I assume the sun. It did come up later the next morning, too much later to be accounted for by the tilt of the earth. I overslept.
In the dark ages they thought everything revolved around the earth, an egocentric notion that belied the notion that humans were the most important thing in existence. Along came some astronomers who deduced that, with the exception of our modest moon, nothing revolved around the earth, in fact, the motions of the planets, stars, comets, and sun was essentially independent of the earth. This was shocking. For this, these men were garroted and stretched like salt-water taffy.
The ball thrown from the train traveling through a vacuum appears to be on a straight line to the person on the train, but to the man on the ground, the ball travels on a curved trajectory. Eventually both men succumb to oxygen deprivation, but not before they discover an important truth: It is a matter of perspective. The sky appeared to shift to me, but to the poor man floating about in space, it was the earth that moved.
I have heard that this is impossible. 'Nothing could possibly bump the earth, jostle it, give it a nudge. Certainly, it cannot be us. It is too big. We are too small. The planets do not revolve around us. The universe is independent of us. We have no significant impact. This is a fact. To suggest that man has fundamentally altered the nature of the earth is shocking. Some things never change.'
You said it.

No Trespassing

What next.

I have this recurring dream of a mountain meadow. The meadow faces to the southwest. It is painted in late evening sunlight, the white setting sun you see only after a fresh cold rain. The rainclouds are breaking up to the east. Cold fog follows the valleys toward the dark canyon below. The wet sedges are dazzling; millions of suns captured in raindrops. The meadow is surrounded by a forest of black Douglas fir.

I am not sure why it keeps coming back to me, or why I keep going back to it, but I felt as though I could have slept forever. Such adventure! Another night, another wilderness journey. I wake up with a beard and howl.

For years I tried to place this dream in reality. I almost found it in Montana. A couple of years ago, when looking to the east at the Beartooth Mountains in Paradise Valley, I saw a sideslope cast in that white evening light, with cobalt blue clouds slipping into the shadows behind the mountains. The trees were Douglas fir. I think I saw a sedge meadow between the trees. I was five miles away at the time. Then I moved and I was one thousand two hundred miles away. But when I slept, I was there.

Then one day, while walking in town, a photograph blew by my feet. I stooped to pick it up. I thought, I must be dreaming. It was the mountain meadow. The Douglas fir, the sparkling sedge, the white sunset, it was all there.

I brought the photograph to an art gallery in town to have it mounted. I imagined it on the wall in front of my desk, visible all day long, inviting me to jump in. I couldn't wait. A week later, when I came by to pick it up, the gallery owner remarked that he had seen the place before. I looked up and asked him where.

"You already told me."

"What did I say?"

"Somewhere."

"I don't believe you."

"Neither do I, but I was there."

He thanked me for the business, smiled, and said he would be back.

He was right. The next time I had a dream about that meadow, the art dealer was there, standing around with his hands in his pockets, staring at the sunset. Motionless. I was a little surprised but made no fuss. After all, the man just stood there. And was it not magnanimous of me to allow some stranger to enjoy the view? Why chase him away? And, sakes alive, the fellow was an art dealer; he could appreciate it. So I walked over a rise and kept out of sight.

Well, he has been there every time since. For a while, he just moved his head a little, looking at things, the sky, the trees, the meadow. He seemed enthralled, wide open, with a big smile. This cheered me. I was not alone. Others saw what I was seeing. But as the days turned to weeks, he started moving around, rummaging in the brush, poking at the ground, clambering across the rocks. This made me nervous. My sleep was shallow, the sort of sleep you have if you have coffee before bed. Then he started to make noise, rattling the branches, tipping things over, talking to himself. This startled me and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night.

Lately, it has gotten worse. He invited several of his friends and they gathered a pile of rocks and dammed up the creek that goes through the meadow. I woke up in a cold sweat. I think they were drinking. The next night they brought out some axes and cut down a swath of the Douglas fir. Then last night, in the distance, I heard the sound of engines.

My God, I am terrified to go to sleep.

Fully disconnected

What do I care.
I picked up the phone the other day and the receiver was warm despite the fact that nobody had been in the house for days and I had not touched the phone for at least as long. This puzzled me.
I have an older style phone that actually has a brass bell embedded somewhere in the hydrocarbon case. When it rings, it gives off a bright and cheery call, one that suggests all sorts of faces and names, but that, to my surprise, does nothing of the sort for so many people. What is going on here? Nowadays, most people respond to this ringing by tilting their heads to one side, then the other. This occurs without any break in their train of thought, conversation or eye contact; it seems their head movement is involuntary. This also puzzles me.
But, how am I any different? There was a time when everybody called out to one another across the fence, the lawn, the yard, the field, the pasture, and if you could hear them, you would respond with a friendly wave and a smile and some sort of card game would be in the offing, maybe a dinner invitation too. Roast beef with mashed potatoes, carrots, and onions - root crops brought up from the cellar. Glasses of fresh-squeezed milk. The wife pulls out another jar from the pantry and it is wild grape jelly from last fall, for the rolls. Fresh-baked plum pie. Hooray! Hands go up in the air. In this large kitchen, around the table, everybody talks at once. Neighbors download neighbors, children link with children, the mob is connected, interfacing, fully compatible. There is talk of crops, schooling, machines, recipes, clothing, animals, moisture, fencing, the dance at the town hall next weekend, and the plans for the barn. Overhead, a curtain of dark blue is moving across the sky. To the east are a few stars. To the west, a ribbon of orange, the afterglow of the sun. It is late. Soon, the children will be rolled up like rugs and carried outside in the direction of a narrow two story house silhouetted against the twilight. The porch light is on. Nighthawks power dive for insects.
But this is not the case anymore. I do not remember the last time my neighbor called over the yard to me and if he did, I do not think I would recognize his voice. I would probably tilt my head to one side, then to the other. What is that feeble rasp? What is this man saying. Is he asking a question or is he making a statement. Is he speaking to me or to himself. Is he friend or foe. Or is not speaking at all. That is what would go through my mind. I think the shock would force me to drop whatever it is I have in my hands and run into the house - maybe reach for the phone.
I think I know the problem. The fellow is fully integrated into modern society. Wires are strung across his forehead, into his pockets, some sort of implant is in his ear canal - both ear canals - he has two or three wallet sized items in his hands that he jabs at with his fingers, then some sort of pencil - all this and he has wrap around mirrored sunglasses. He is connected.
This has been going on for years.
Now, he doesn't realize that he has lost hearing in the 500-2000 Hz range, the range of the human voice. Shouting won't work. It isn't from damage, it's from disuse. The same can be said about his vocal chords. They have atrophied, tenuously thin, one more cough, one more sneeze, one more clearing of throat, and they snap, sending out a frail note, like the pluck of a toy guitar string, like the peep of a baby chick.
Did you say something?
Huh?
But nobody will miss a thing. Decades from now, physicians will consider the human ear and vocal chords as vestigial appendages, something to be excised for optimal health and development. A great industry will arise with thousands of surgeons around the globe performing a public service, elevating the human race to a higher plane of existence, pulling them out of the gummy primordial soup, the Neanderthal stew, synthesizing the forces of natural selection and human genius to create a human being that towers above this brutish, flabby-eared, whooping fellow he is today. This will be as common as today's visit to the dentist to remove wisdom teeth, those teeth that have pushed your smile so far forward that all of your friends have abandoned you and the circus has begun to call.
Excuse me, the phone is ringing.