Long Road to California

by Myanne Shelley

  Chapter 6

  Caleb on the Farm

  It’s only a couple days into our grand journey to follow Grandma Vera’s migrant trail, and I’m wondering if we’ll whip through it in a week and end up camping at the closest free BLM camp to home, waiting for our friend the professor to vacate the house and let us back into our lives.

  We camped last night at a not unpleasant little lake at a small wildlife area. It was warm but not too hot, pleasant rolling out the air mattresses in just the basic tent frame. Not many bugs. After the long day’s drive I could have seen fit to stay there a day or two, but Nina was anxious to get an early start. Barely let me drink the cheap coffee we brewed (or more accurately heated up on the camp stove). Another concession to our need for caffeine but at a bargain price; no Starbucks for us on this trip, assuming they even have them out here in the hinterlands.

  We’ve been swapping out driving, so it hasn’t been too bad. Not much to see out here, for sure though. Nina’s mentioned that any number of times, and it makes me wonder just what she expected. Was she so enamoured with the facial expressions and contrasts of black and white in Uncle Stan’s photos that she missed how the first bunch were taken in the middle of nowhere?

  She’s at the wheel as we cross into the Oklahoma panhandle. It’s pretty damn bleak, I can’t deny it. Nothing much growing. Not many cars. Oil thingees off in the distance. This is technically a highway, but it’s narrow, not well traveled. But it’s not far across. Into Kansas, we basically take a left at the town of Liberal. That name’s been cracking us up with every highway sign.

  A quiet half hour or so passes. One of her folksy singers croons on the CD. Blame Sally blaming somebody. We’ve brought a wide range of music to suit both our tastes and the times of day, Beatles and Ramones, Talking Heads and Indigo Girls. Quiet tunes for the morning; I’m not much listening anyway, thinking instead about the scores and stats from the news report we heard earlier. Thinking it’s way too early in the season to be thinking post-season, but mapping out the division leader match ups anyway. Always enjoyed the near limitless potential of a baseball season. So many variables and so many possible outcomes. One little ninth inning hit or injury or new guy off the bench can ripple out so far.

  Nina slows carefully just past the Kansas border, and turns the music volume down even further. The outskirts of town are right here. She’s got a city person’s paranoia about small town cops. Or maybe an occasional pot smoking Bay Area liberal’s fear.

  “We’re white people in a pick up with Texas plates,” I remind her. “They’ll be throwing out the welcome mat.”

  “It’s not much of a town, is it. Can you tell where the turn off is?”

  We pull up behind an ancient looking sedan, an old man barely visible behind the wheel. A couple trucks rattle towards us; otherwise the town seems pretty much asleep midmorning.

  I glance at the little unit Dee left plugged in for us. “GPS says it’s D Street.” The highway becomes the main road. Stocky little houses appear alongside it. A lone dog on a long leash eyes the truck but doesn’t even bark, as if that would be too much trouble. “There’s gas,” I point out. We’ve been stopping every hundred fifty, two hundred miles. Getting gas when we see it. Nina scoped out that we wouldn’t run out this way, even out here away from the bigger towns.

  Not much selection – we fill up, use the bathroom, stretch. Nina wants to do some yoga or pilates, but restrains herself. Even her toe touches have garnered attention from the guy behind the counter of the dinky little store. He sits up a bit from his slouch, watching us, raising a lazy hand toward the driver of a car that eases by out front.

  He’s friendly enough when I go inside to pay, greeting me with a slow, flat, southern drawl. I restrain myself from buying anything, and the dude seems satisfied with my purchase of half a tank. We had an adequate breakfast of fruit and Walmart breakfast bars earlier. Lunch will be out of the cooler, in theory at the old farmstead. Ice cream bars at 11 am are an added expense and empty calories that we just don’t do anymore. Being on the road makes me want one though.

  I take the wheel when we get back into the truck. We don’t even have to exchange words about it – I know she’ll want to be able to take pictures as we approach the farm. Or whatever’s left of it. Nina scrabbles around in the bags. She’s got her everyday camera up front already, ready for anything, but she’s pulling out the fancy one, and her tripod. She’s been careful to pack it out of sight – it was expensive, even buying it refurbished, and she’d be devastated to have it stolen or broken.

  Car break ins seem not to be a thing out here, though, it’s a far cry from Oakland. This little town is pretty much the sort of place where people leave the keys in the car, even leave the engine running while they do their errands, and no one blinks. There’s hardly anyone even here to blink.

  I find the street that heads west, and turn. “She thought it was about 20 miles from here,” Nina says. “Check the odometer.”

  I do, but I wonder whether Grandma really has a clue, if she’s remembering something she was told 60 years ago. We roll slowly out of town. It’s warm again. I guess I should just assume it’s warm here every day, although Dee told us we might see thunderstorms.

  There’s one big old house with a nice garden out front. Many others of the more run down variety. Then quickly we’re back to the wide open fields. Grasses off to the side, lining the little two lane road. Beyond, dry looking fields of something stubby. It’s early May, maybe they just planted? I can’t think what kind of crops they would grow here. Supposedly they raise cattle around here too, but I don’s see any. “What is that, you think?” I ask.

  Nina looks up, distracted from fiddling with her lenses. “I don’t know. Hay?”

  “They just grow, like, hay?” It seems weird. But she could be right.

  “For the livestock to eat, sure. How far?”

  It’s been three miles. We go on like that, watching the miles slowly pass, looking for changes in the landscape. Or anything that could show where the old house might have been, and the yard and barn and their vegetable garden that supposedly kept them all from starving until it got too dry too. There’s one dusty old road, fenced off, a long flat track that disappears into the distance of the low planted hay or whatever it is. No buildings or remains of buildings.

  The truck bounces along. I crack a window for a sec, and hot dry dusty air blows in. Next to me, Nina is tracking the view out the other side, and it’s no different. “Bleak,” she says. “I can’t imagine them growing much here.”

  “Well, I guess they didn’t,” I point out.

  “But for awhile they did. People came here for the chance to own their own piece of farmland. Vera’s parents did that, they came to make a life for themselves out here. They managed to keep it going for twenty years, right?”

  I nod. I know the story. So did all kinds of poverty stricken people from the eastern US and from the British Isles like my great grandparents. And not long after they all took up their farms, cultivation technology changed. People went from simple plowing with horses along the contours of their land, to tractors that tore up the topsoil. Got it all loose plus ripped out all the native grasses that helped hold it down. Everybody planting wheat or cotton because there was money to be made, except for when there wasn’t. Pile on a drought, which until faced with it, people had pretty much denied could happen, evidence of prior such conditions ignored or forgotten. Pile on the Great Depression.

  I back myself out of my head, out of my sudden vivid imaginings of the arid land around me swirling with dust. We’ve gone 19 miles. I slow.

  “What, do you see something?” Nina asks.

  “We’re coming up on twenty miles.” The landscape shows no changes; we could be in a video game with an endless loop of dull dry grass on either side of a dull flat road. Twenty one miles pass, twenty two. “Say if I should pu
ll over.”

  Nina shakes her head. “Not yet. She said the house was up top of a slope. It might be farther along – look for a hill.”

  I start to laugh – I don’t think there’s such a thing in the whole state. But she’s serious. I speed up a little, to 45 or so, and squint into the horizon. We pass a few little bushes, and the next set of stubby grass looks to be maybe a different color than the last. The sky stretches pale but bright ahead, heat waves shimmering off the pavement in the distance.

  “There, look,” Nina says, pointing out her side.

  We both see it – another of those tiny side roads and what could, comparatively, be called a hill. A slight rise off to the right, beyond the little road. Nothing much planted, just dirt and more of this scrubby grass.

  “This must be it,” she exclaims. “Damn, there’s a gate.”

  I ease the truck onto the dirt track just in front of the gate, then edge past. It doesn’t seem likely I’ll be blocking anybody, this is just from habit, I guess. “Even if this isn’t it, it can be, you know? This is what it must have been like.” I get out, and feel the dry wind.

  Nina’s in full photographer mode, strapping on her good camera and shouldering the lens bag, tripod, case.

  “You see any shade? You still want to eat out here, or should we look for something more, um,” I struggle for a the right word. “Or we could eat in the truck with the AC.”

  “I might be awhile,” she says. “And I’m kind of hungry.”

  I bow to the inevitable. Heat and discomfort be damned, we’ve finally reached the starting point. I burrow around in the coolers for cold water and the sandwiches we made. And the last of the cookies Dee packed for us.

  Nina’s already scouted out a break in the fence a little way along, and forged through the short rough grass to the track on the other side. I stuff the food in the mini cooler, grab a blanket, and follow. Grudgingly around the fence as my bum knee prevents me from just hopping over, my natural first impulse. She’s at least kind enough not to make a point of this, that she’s found a flat path, that I shouldn’t climb fences.

  Leg’s not that stiff from sitting at least. The truck has a high front seat, lots of room to move my left leg around, stretch it out. While Nina strides off along the little road, I stretch a bit, then tag along. Keeping an eye out for where we might sit and eat, I spot another, bigger mound of scrubby bushes that at least offer a bit of shade. Set down the blanket and cooler, take a long cool drink of water.

  Out here, cold water refreshes in a way you forget in your day to day life, I realize. Even the sandwich seems extra tasty. Think of being out here all day in an open back car that does 45 tops, no AC, no cooler or ice. No cookies. No GPS, not sure of where or if you’ll manage to find a safe place to spend the night. Makes a too warm picnic with lousy scenery seem not so bad, I’ve got to admit.

  Nina’s pushing through dried grass around the highest part of the little mound, looking for signs of the old house, I guess. “See it?” I call over.

  “Nothing.” She comes back long enough to scarf down half her sandwich, but her eye is focussed back on the mound. “That first shot, the kids and the chickens?” she says, still half chewing. “Wasn’t it a flat surface right in front of a barn?”

  I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter now, I mean there’s no barn, no chickens, no kids. No farm either, no one family’s land, no proud owners.

  Nina edges back, tripod tucked under her arm. “I guess this will just be the lack of anything that used to be here in that first picture,” she says, echoing my thoughts. “It will show the stark contrast at least.”

  I finish my food, leisurely. Click on my phone. Don’t really expect to see bars, am not surprised there’s no coverage. I read over some stuff I’d already downloaded. Hope no disaster has befallen Lucia, or rather assume she’ll have the good sense to call Dee or Nina’s sister or the parents of a friend. I mean if she needs adult input. Which remains pretty unlikely.

  I glance up at Nina, who’s now splayed out by her lowered tripod, trying for some funky angle, I guess, for the “after” shots bereft of kids and animals. Nina says I forget about our daughter when she’s not around. Or the cats, back before they met their demise. I’ll admit to having a fairly strong out of sight, out of mind tendency. But that’s healthy, I think. She obsesses, sometimes, about things we haven’t the slightest control over. Lucia’s doings among her obsessions, I’d have to say.

  I’m not worried about Grandma Vera in our absence either. I mean not any more than I’d worry that something might happen to an 88 year old lady. But checking in – I don’t see the Skyping working much out here. Who knows if she’ll see Nina’s emails. But we’ll be back soon enough, right? I put away the phone, bored, a bit overheated. Nina must be roasting, but when she’s deep in, she goes to a place where she kind of leaves her body behind.

  Watching her so involved in her task, and thinking about going back, both make me think about the jobs I don’t have. The networking I’ll need to take up, the excuses or whatever that need to be made, the groveling before I can line up some serious jobs. Downer stuff, stuff we’re here to get away from, I tell myself. Instead, I mosey back farther along the track, see if I can spot signs of the old barn or anything. The grass is taller, waving languid in the breeze. It’s very still. Quiet, no cars or birds, no electrical humming or planes overhead. But as far as the old barn, there’s nothing that I can see. As if it was never here.

  Not much farther down the road we’ve been driving, there’s the Cimarron National Grasslands. We’re due to take a look – this is a wide area where they restored the native grasses, brought the landscape back to how it’s supposed to be, how it was before all the white folks showed up and scraped it bare.

  But what did they know, right? Your individual farmer or Scottish immigrant dreaming of being a farmer, they don’t see themselves as part of a massive trend. They were just people trying to provide for their families, trying to live off the land. I can’t feel much anger toward choices my great grandparents might have made here.

  If anything, I feel gratitude. Amazement. All the miles they traveled, to reach this dried out patch of Kansas, and then the guts it took to admit they’d lost their battle with this land. To pick up and drive the family another 1,200 miles, start life over again. Give Grandma Vera and her brothers a shot at achieving a middle class life, and all that and more for Mom, for Dee and me.

  I stretch my arms up toward the sky for a moment, and spin slowly, 360 degrees. That life they had here is so thoroughly gone, there’s not a fence post, not even a foundation of a house to be seen.

  Nina wants to show the before and after, and to sketch in the details of who took the trip, where they all ended up after. Being here at the starting gate, it hits me in a way it hasn’t before, the sacrifices made. How very far the Granger and Byrnes families have come.

  I head back toward the car, to see if she’s gotten the shots she needs. Know already the next “after” shot will have to be set up with the tripod – just her and me waving out of our loaded down car. Our lives half over already, our route fully mapped out. Such a pale contrast to that picture with all those excited kids.