One of the farmers paused his digging suddenly and turned to me with a look of surprise.
“That one nearly escaped under the guise of a fart,” he said, “but at the last moment, its identity was revealed and its plot for exodus foiled.”
“Soiled?” Matthew exclaimed. “You soiled yourself?”
“Foiled, my friend. Foiled. But now I need to pinch one, if you’ll excuse me.”
Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head in embarrassment as the man threw down his shovel and waddled toward one of the two small sheds they used for outhouses.
“That’s Lucas. I just call him Number Two,” he said, “and that other idiot out there digging is Nathan. I call him Number One. Whatever happens, if he challenges you to a sword fight, decline. There’s no shame in it.”
The man who was still digging laughed. “Probably more shame in accepting,” he said.
“They’re plumbing experts,” Matthew continued. “Something that happens to benefit me in my trade, so I keep them around. They needed food and a place to sleep. I needed extra hands and a leach field, for both the latrine and the crops.”
I heard Lucas yell through the walls of the outhouse, “That’s funny.”
“What’s that?” Nathan yelled back.
“I don’t remember eating a football.”
“Damn it!” Matthew scolded. “What did I say about that kind of talk? Have some class!” Then he turned to me to apologize for his comrade, “I’m sorry. He’s very crude.”
After a while, Lucas emerged from the outhouse and came to introduce himself formally. I declined to shake his hand. His hygiene was suspect. Despite their demeanor, though, Nathan and Lucas were clearly skilled in their craft. Everyone excels at something, I figure, and each person and each trade is a necessary piece of the puzzle. That’s the beauty of humanity. It’s just a matter of determining one’s calling. That’s the tough part. Sometimes it takes a disaster to find that out.
Matthew made sure that his guests washed properly before handling food, even in the fields. Cleanliness was a rule of the house, one that I was pleased to abide by. Cleanliness is next to godliness; isn’t that what they say? When we sat down for dinner that night, there was a pitcher of ice water awaiting us at the table.
Ice water.
Water with ice in it.
I had never thought I would miss such a thing after the previous winter, but then, having sustained the scorching summer without a single ice-cold glass of the most basic necessity for life on earth, I could hardly restrain my thirst long enough for them to finish their prayer. When I finally took a sip, the flavor gave me goose bumps all over. It was the freshest, most delicious drink I had ever tasted.
They had a deep underground cellar where ice was stored. They would pack the walls in the winter, and it would last until the next. In the center of the cellar, surrounded by walls of ice, they could keep produce or meat, if the need arose. That wasn’t common, though. Enough people relied on the area farmland that there was seldom a surplus great enough to require long-term storage. There was never a shortage, though. Matthew was what I would call a giver. He and his farm were almost entirely self-sufficient, but like Abraham, he shared his blessings with those less fortunate in those times. People like them gave the rest of us hope. Besides, there was more than enough land to feed everyone. It’s a mystery why people had ever gone hungry in the old world.
Waking the next morning, I questioned the ethics behind my decision to abandon the mission and call it complete. My morals seemed confused by the planned change in course, and I decided to stick around the farm a few days, conflicted as my conscience was.
The internal debate over my destination raged silently while I worked the fields with Matthew and his family. It was a decision that grew more important and less certain with every passing moment. I didn’t speak much, which was fine. My time was better spent in contemplation, and there was plenty of solitude in the crop rows.
Before sunset on the third evening, I was sitting on the porch, dicing hot peppers to use as a wildlife repellant for some of the crops. I hadn’t worn gloves, and the juice from the peppers was burning my hands and face with a fury that rinsing with water only intensified. It felt like fiery needles pricking my skin everywhere. Matthew came through the door and sat next to me, squeezing the juice from a tomato over my hands.
“See how that does,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“See, we take care of the crops, and they take care of us.”
“What was it like for you before?” I asked.
“Harder,” he said. “My expenses running this place were twice what I took home, and people who didn’t know better criticized us for taking government subsidies when the corporate farms were putting us out of business. You wouldn’t believe what they used to feed livestock at those places and their animal factories. There were plenty of resources to provide for everyone, but where was the incentive? Sometimes we were paid more not to produce. The industry wasn’t valued, and there was a separation between the producers and the consumers so that the only winner was big business.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re rich.” He laughed. “We don’t have any money, and we’re richer than we’ve ever been.”
I sat back and took a deep breath as the burning sensation in my hands began to subside.
“Smell that rain?” he said. “It’s coming tonight.”
Sleeping hadn’t been easy, but that night a fine storm came through and the sounds of distant thunder and raindrops on the aluminum roof soothed my soul enough to doze off. I was thankful to be indoors. Lightning flashed shadows on the walls of the bedroom in the old farmhouse. Storms can be miserable when you’re sleeping outside, but so calming when you have a solid roof over your head.
The following morning, we stepped out of the house to start work, and Matthew paused on the porch, looking out as the sun rose over the fields. It was quiet, as if the fresh rain on the ground and the crops absorbed every sound the way the ground and the crops had absorbed the rain. The air was cool and still.
“So what do you think, Joe?” Matthew asked me.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Is this not the greenest crop you’ve ever seen?”
“It may be.”
“I love the way they look after a storm. So refreshed. Rejuvenated.”
“They’re healthy,” I said.
“Yup. All we use is all natural animal waste. We eat from the land, the cows eat from the land, the horses eat from the land, and when we’re through with it, we give it back to the land. Who ever decided it was a good idea to pump healthy foods full of chemicals and hormones and antibiotics? As if humans could improve upon nature in a lab. Outsmart God.”
I enjoyed harvesting their tomatoes. I would tug a wooden cart through the rows with me and pluck them, one by one, slowly filling it until I could barely pull it through the dirt. Then I would take it to the house, empty it, and head back into the field. There were so many of them that the work never ended. They were enormous. Bright red. Sometimes when the area wildlife got a little greedy, Matthew would spray the crops with a solution of vinegar, water, and crushed hot peppers that the animals found less appealing, but mostly it wasn’t a problem. He figured the land belonged to them as much as it belonged to us, so he didn’t mind sacrificing a few fruits and vegetables. Besides, a healthy wildlife population was as important to keeping us fed as the crops were.
West. South. I was deeply conflicted. On that last day before I left home, when I told Maria that I would dream of her night and day, I’d had no idea how true it would be. She was always there. But every day I was gone, she seemed less and less real. When everything you know to be true about your life is suddenly taken away or abandoned, as the case may be, even your memories start to change. Everything was unfamiliar then. Even the places we had been to before were different. I had nothing left to associate with my memories of my wife. There was no tele
phone and certainly no e-mail. I couldn’t even receive a letter from her. There I was on a farm with a family I had never met before, completely isolated from everything I ever knew, yet closer to home than I had been in months. It would be so easy, I thought. I could be there in a week. But, I wondered, would she still take me back?
I found myself standing alone in the field with beads of perspiration running down my face, staring into the distance at the blue cloudless sky, surrounded by what I thought was the most radiant green I had ever seen. My soaked shirt was draped over the cart and my pants were drenched in sweat. My skin was tan, and my hands were calloused. Muscles chiseled, waist thin. Thick beard and long hair turning blond from the sun. I didn’t look the same as I had with her. She might not even recognize me, I thought. The sun was beating down, but I was so deep in contemplation that I didn’t notice it. “In the zone,” they used to call it. To what zone were they referring, I wondered—some place better than here and now or just dreaming with your eyes open? I don’t know how long I was standing there before I heard Matthew’s voice.
“You all right out here, Joe?”
“Yes.”
“Been standing out here awhile. I saw you from the house.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Thinking about that pretty girl you got back home?”
“I can’t get her out of my head.”
“Yeah, I know what that’s like. I spent a few years overseas right after I got married,” he said, pulling up his sleeve to reveal a faded “Semper Fi” tattoo on his bicep. “It wasn’t easy, but we got through it all right.”
“How?”
“Love and hope, my friend.”
“What if I forget those things?”
“You won’t forget the love. I had the same thought back then, but if it’s real, it doesn’t go away. Hope is the tough part. You focus on that love, and it will always come back.”
“I miss her. I think I have to go home.”
“You could do that,” he said. “Someone else will pick up where you left off.”
“But when?”
“That’s the question.”
“I could go home and bring her back with me. Things haven’t been the way I thought they would be. People, I mean.”
“That’s not what I’d worry about out west. I’d worry about the earth and the wilderness. And the winter. You don’t want to put your wife through that.”
“I should just go home.”
“Regret is the heaviest burden you’ll ever carry.”
As hard as it was to accept, I knew he was right. I went through my gear that evening and found the two letters I had been asked to deliver out west from the Big Apple, destined for Los Angeles and Denver. More than half of the people I had set out to reach were still severed from the rest of us. Regardless of my original motives, I realized that it wasn’t about me anymore. It was no longer about satisfaction of my own self-worth. I had to finish what I had started for the good of millions. Hundreds of millions. It was my calling, something I had never experienced before. I had never done anything selfless. Nothing that had required true sacrifice, anyway. If I provided a service, there was always compensation, financial or otherwise. Not anymore.
The letter I wrote to Maria that night was different from the others. It was sweeter. I wondered whether she would see me changing through my words. The ink on the page bled with stray tears. I was ahead of schedule, I told her, and I couldn’t wait to see her. And I would see her soon. I loved her.
I gave that letter to Matthew the next morning for delivery, and I set out with Nomad after breakfast.
“Good luck out there,” said Matthew as I saddled up. “And God bless.”
10
ALONE IN THE NORTH
The sight of another person became scarce within a few days of leaving the Green Mill. Nomad and I passed by what used to be Milwaukee and Minneapolis–St. Paul and continued northwest on the old highway. We stopped briefly outside those places and other small settlements as we came across them, but they thinned out quickly. The highway was quiet and empty. There weren’t many cars left around up there. Fewer drifters passed by until eventually there were none.
The weather was growing cooler, which was a relief from what had been a scorching summer. Whether it was actually hotter than any other summer, I don’t know, but it sure felt like it. All day in the sun in the humidity of the ocean can make eighty-five degrees feel like a hundred, and a hundred unbearable. It was less brutal up north as autumn approached. For a while, we had a nice breeze from behind us that cooled the sweat on my back. We traveled farther on days like that. The more pleasant the weather was, the longer we could go before our exhaustion got the better of us. When it was scorching hot or pouring rain, our endurance suffered. Sometimes I would get down and walk, and I almost had to drag Nomad to keep him going. Sometimes he pushed me. Slow days were excruciating, especially up north. All I could think about was how far we were from our next destination on the west coast, and every step was taking me farther from home.
The land was flat and green for a while, and then flat and brown. Giant hay bales lined the sides of the road and lay dispersed throughout fields. Nomad ate from them. I hunted small game and ate from trees, weeds, and farm fields. There were many farm fields in the east, but they became scarcer as we moved west. I fished when we came to water. Sometimes I starved, not because there was no food, at least at first, but because I was so anxious to move on that feeding myself just wasn’t a priority. I learned to block the hunger out. My stomach had shrunken on the journey so much that I could feel the void in my bowels. I missed Maria’s cooking. My own on the road didn’t make me want to eat until I had to, but I needed the energy to move on. Most of the time, I didn’t even bother with a fire anymore. I caught fish and ate them raw after scraping off the scales and gutting them with my knife, which was beginning to dull with daily use.
Shadows of clouds flowed like water over the fields and subtle hills. Every time one passed over, the landscape seemed to change. Bright green and glistening yellow fields lost their shine and turned to gray, but when the clouds passed, the shine would return. Sometimes their shadows brought me relief from the sun. Sometimes they brought deep sorrow.
Eagles glided overhead. Small herds of bison, cattle, elk, or moose wandered the prairie and grazed, and they usually didn’t have any objection to our passing through. Heads would rise to watch, following us along the endless highway line that split the plain in two. Nomad feared nothing. He was at home in the wilderness among the beasts. When we had passed, heads would lower again as if we had never been there. Life in the wild went on.
At night, I slept out under the stars most of the time. I had quit pitching the tent weeks before unless the weather warranted it. Nomad, it seemed, could sense my homesickness, and he would move closer to where I lay as if to comfort me. I never knew a horse to express such affection and compassion, let alone one who had been wild less than a year before. I would sit up and pet his muzzle, feeling his hot, moist breath on my face, trying my best not to drag him into my sorrow.
“I’m fine, my friend,” I would assure him. “We’ll be headed home soon.” It was like lying to a child, but of course, he couldn’t understand. All he knew to do was love me, and he trusted me to take care of him. Sometimes, even the faith of an animal can be inspiring. It was comforting to have at least some connection to a creature, even if not a person. He was all I had for nearly two months in the north, and the solitude brought us closer.
I thought of a cruise we had taken once, Maria and I. I remembered standing at the bow of the ship at night, looking out at nothing but water as far as I could see, and that sickening feeling of isolation the first time being surrounded by the endless black ocean.
Like floating in space.
Nothing above.
Nothing below.
As vast and wildly open as this land was, I felt as separated from the rest of the world as Robinson Crusoe alon
e on his island. Despite the difference in geography, it was the state of my consciousness that mirrored that of the proverbial man marooned. During the day, I had little more to do than to ponder the world and everything that had happened. I tried to maintain a constant state of meditation, tuning out the monotonous clapping of hooves on the pavement. Anything to keep my mind occupied. A vacant mind is dangerous to its owner and everyone around him. It’s counterproductive. It leads to complacency, ignorance, anger, and violence. None of those had any place in my life on the road and would only make the journey more trying. I did math in my head just for something to do. I struck up conversations with my horse.
“Nomad,” I said, “if a guy on a horse leaves Chicago traveling toward Seattle at twenty miles per hour at the same time another guy on a horse leaves Seattle traveling toward Chicago at thirty miles per hour, how long before they meet?”
Wishful thinking.
“The distance? What do you mean ‘rest time’? Other variables? Ceteris paribus. No, I’m sure you’re the fastest horse on this road. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. No, I don’t think talking to a horse makes me crazy.”
Not yet, anyway.
After a while, strange dreams began to come. I dreamed about people I barely knew. People I had only seen at work. People I hadn’t seen in years. People I had never met. It made me wonder how we’re all connected.
I dreamed of nights with Maria when we first moved to the farm. Though we had lost everything else, we made love with a passion that transcended the friction of our bodies, her breath in my ear and the look of ecstasy on her beautiful face glowing in the firelight. It was a passion that touched my soul, inspiring the same from me, the depth of our love truly manifested in the act of the same name.
I dreamed that she had left me.
I dreamed I was in a small boat at night in the middle of the ocean—a wooden boat, with a roof and a small cabin, but no sails or oars. A giant marlin had a hold of it and was tugging it violently, thrashing in the water, nearly capsizing my vessel. I dove in to fight the fish, blinding black water all around me, but I woke before the fight was over.
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