The End of Country

by Seamus McGraw

  And so my father, my sister, and I increasingly took refuge outside the house and beyond the yard. It might have been in part an act of self-defense, but it was then that my old man decided to become a gentleman farmer. It was something he had always wanted to try, a desire instilled in him by his own father, whose dream of escaping the mines and rebuilding the life that his father had left behind in County Mayo never came to pass. But as it turned out, farming didn’t come naturally to my old man.

  That became evident the first year we owned the place, when my grandfather turned up with a boxload of potato plants. The three of us enthusiastically carved out a small patch of dirt—about a quarter acre—and stuck the plants into the ground, convinced that we had, by virtue of our roots in Ireland, a genetic talent for raising spuds. In fact, my grandfather had been adept enough with potatoes that he managed to grow a few in the coal ash beds he had built in the dank, dismal basement of his house. Tragically, that gene was not transmitted to my father or me. I will never forget the look of disappointment on my grandfather’s face, or the look of abject shame on my father’s, when, a week after we planted them, all that remained of the potato plants were a few lifeless stalks.

  To his credit, though, my father didn’t quit. The way he figured it, his pride now depended on finding a way to make that land produce something, and he also thought that turning his hand to farming would help him earn respect, not just from his father but from the neighbors.

  At first, those neighbors, all of them dairy farmers, were baffled by my father. They had spent their lives fighting a never-ending battle to coax enough hay and corn out of this ungenerous soil to keep their herds going for one more year and couldn’t for the life of them understand why anybody would choose to farm if he didn’t have to.

  But he was so earnest and insistent as he badgered them for tips on how make a go of the farm that eventually they embraced him. Old Leon Williams, the patriarch of the clan that farmed much of the land around my family’s place, was the first to take him under his wing. It was Leon who nudged him toward beef farming, figuring that it was far less demanding than dairy farming—you could pretty much just fatten them up on grass and hay and let nature do the bulk of the work—and it was Leon who helped him pick out his first tractor, a 1941 Farmall Model A that he bought for $395 and immediately slathered with a coat of lead-infused barn-red paint.

  The problem was that, as hard as Leon and the other neighbors tried to help, as hard as they tried to teach him, my father just wasn’t much of a farmer. And the harder he tried, the less of a gentleman he became. My father had been reared in a time when there were certain words a man didn’t use, not just in mixed company but ever. I didn’t even know my father knew those words until I heard him use them all one afternoon as he and I battled our way home with a mean and randy young Angus bull, a snorting knot of black hatred that had plowed through one of our fences and was harassing the neighbors’ milk cows.

  Still, my father kept at it, building up the herd until at last we had more than thirty head of cattle, odd hybrids of Holsteins, white-faced Herefords, and Black Angus. In a way, my father was a man who was ahead of his time. Nowadays, of course, grass-fed, range-raised beef is the meat of choice for enlightened, environmentally sensitive, and compassionate foodies, and with good reason. It is far less cruel than raising the beasts in cramped, filthy corporate feedlots, where they’re shot full of drugs and chemicals. But back then, few people gave much thought to such concerns, focusing instead on the plentiful, uniformly flavorful, and reliably tender meat that corporate farming provided.

  My father was one of the few who resisted the technocorporate approach to farming. Apart from his unreasoning hatred of woodchucks, he was really a softhearted guy who objected to the fundamental cruelty of factory farming. He couldn’t stand the thought of animals suffering in cattle concentration camps. What’s more, after spending years working for the pharmaceutical industry, he had come to be skeptical of what he saw as its excesses, and as a result he was none too keen on feeding his food drugs, either.

  To him, free-range beef farming was the only way to go. Unfortunately, my father had made more than a few flawed assumptions in sketching out his grand vision for the farm. The first was that he believed that if he simply gave his herd a reasonably open range, providing them with hay only when it was necessary, the cows would reward him by fattening themselves up and turning themselves into succulent steaks and burgers. Modern farmers who raise grass-fed beef now understand that their herds, like any other crop, have to be rotated, that their pastures must be rested and fertilized and replenished, that their cows should be introduced to fresh pastures a few acres at a time and, before that pasture is played out, moved to the next.

  My father took a far more laissez-faire approach, letting his herd wander wherever it pleased whenever it pleased. The result was that the pastures were quickly ravaged, and once they were, the herd would scramble up and down the steep, rocky inclines to the next patch of grass. All that exercise made them healthy and happy—every cow in the herd was buff enough to have won a spot on the Soviet Union’s Olympic shot put team. But as a commodity, they were next to useless. It’s fat that gives meat its tenderness and its flavor, and there wasn’t an ounce of it on those animals.

  As a result, whenever we’d cart a few off to auction, the buyers would poke them a few times with their cane, shake their heads gloomily, and offer as little as possible for the creatures, figuring that they could grind them into hamburger or, in a pinch, use them for dog food.

  For our part, we had a few slaughtered for ourselves, and our nightly meals tended to be silent affairs, with the four of us chewing, and chewing, and chewing, until the tasteless meat could be forced down our esophagi with only minor danger of choking. A culinary buddy system developed. It became standard practice in our house never to eat meat alone, just in case.

  Still, my old man kept at it, and he pressed me into service. In the fall, I’d string barbed wire around the pastures and the hay fields, but only when he forced me to. I’d cut and stack hay in the summer—that was far more fun, because we had worked out an agreement with the neighbors to share the work and the hay, so it became a social event. We’d work from just after dawn until milking time at dusk, feverishly tossing thousands of 25-pound bales of fresh-cut timothy and alfalfa to each other in a kind of hay bale bucket brigade, stacking them in a crisscross pattern until we had built a wall forty feet high in the haymow in the barn. On Sundays we didn’t put in hay; that was the day of rest. At least most of it was. Our dairy-farming neighbors still had to get up at dawn to milk their cows, and they still had to muck out the barn. But after that, we’d all gather at the house of an eighty-six-year-old spinster schoolteacher with the potpourri-scented name of Lucretia Davis, who was affectionately referred to by just about everybody as Cousin Keat.

  Even in the winter of her years, she was as a straight as a shagbark, and sharp and kind and wise. Before this latest generation was born, she was one of the only people in the area to have attended college—she had gone to Columbia University in 1902, a remarkable achievement for any woman at that time, let alone one from rural Pennsylvania. She had taken a job as a teacher in the New York City school system, and the day she retired in 1941, she bought a brand-new jet-black Ford sedan, packed it with all her belongings, and drove back home. She was still driving that car in the mid-1970s. You’d see her coming down the road, her paisley bonnet and the tops of her rimless glasses just visible above the steering wheel, hustling along that two-lane with surprising speed.

  No one embodied the rhythms of the place as thoroughly as Cousin Keat. She’d spend every Saturday in front of her ancient woodstove, baking banana bread and spice cake; she’d ice bottles of Coke in the cooler; and on Sundays, after chores and church, all the neighbors, kids and adults, would drive or walk or ride their ponies to Keat’s house to socialize. In the cupboard in her dining room she used to keep an old shoebox filled with money, chan
ge mostly, but a few crinkled bills as well. I remember pretending not to watch as one of our neighbors, whose last check from the dairy hadn’t been big enough to pay his bills for the month, ducked out of Keat’s kitchen and into the dining room to take what was needed and slipped back, hoping that no one was any the wiser. That’s why Keat put the money there in the first place. It was always repaid. At least Keat assumed it was.

  As per my father’s instructions, I’d tend the calves, and in winter, it was up to me to feed and water the cattle. In between, I learned a little bit about how cruel and capricious the land can be. One lesson in particular still stands out. We had owned the farm for about two years when it happened. An aged Holstein belonging to one of our neighbors, a cow that was already weakened by age and suffering from mastitis poisoning, a common but easily treated malady among Holsteins, had wandered into a swamp and collapsed. Her head was above the water, but her weakened frame was stuck deep in the mud. My neighbors and I tried everything to get her out—at one point we even tried tying a rope around her front legs, hooking it up to the tractor, and dragging her out—but the more we pulled, the deeper she sank into the muck. I remember being struck by the contrast between my bitter disappointment—it bordered on rage—over how, despite all we had done, the cow had died, and how calmly my neighbor had accepted defeat.

  I learned that lesson again the following winter, when the nature of the place played cruel with us. My father had finally mastered the art of keeping his cows more or less on his own land and had made grand plans to double the herd, buying about half a dozen calves, when suddenly a virus that had been going around that year hit our cattle. Within a few days, it had infected every one of them, and for nearly a week after that my father and I took shifts around the clock, not so much nursing the calves as trying to ease their suffering, but to no avail. One by one, the calves died. My father or I, or both of us, would tie baling twine around the dead calf’s hind legs and drag the carcass a few dozen yards from the barn, far enough, we hoped, to prevent the virus from infecting the other calves. We’d leave them on the frozen ground, praying that the cold would preserve them until we could find a few free moments to bury them. But even in the bitter cold the scent of death travels, and every time night fell, the predators—coyotes, field rats, whatever—would come and feed. In the mornings, the scavengers—vultures and crows—would battle each other to take the predators’ place.

  He never said anything about it, at least not out loud—that’s the way my father was—but I could see in his eyes that he felt responsible for the suffering these animals endured. The night the last calf died, my father walked from the barn into the house and came back a few minutes later, carrying his .22. It was loaded. He handed it to me and dragged the calf outside. My father was never big on asking me to do anything—he’d either issue a direct order or simply make it clear that he expected something—but this time, he did ask. “Do me a favor? Keep an eye on her tonight. And if anything comes after her, shoot it?”

  We buried that calf and what remained of the others the next morning. Though my father kept up farming for another six years after that, his heart was no longer in it.

  The truth was, my heart was never in farming, and every chance I got I’d vanish, disappearing into the deep woods that plunged from the top of our hill into a rugged gully below. I’d meet up there with my best friend, Ralph. He’d bring the cigarettes, always a crushed pack of Marlboros that he stuffed down the front of his pants so his father wouldn’t catch him during morning chores. He knew every corner of Ellsworth Hill and the hollows around it and all of the hidden things they contained. He knew where the old tumbled stone bridge was, and he had a knack for finding fresh tracks left by coyotes or bobcats beneath the undergrowth. Sometimes we’d make our way up along the ridge that ran from the highest part of my family’s land for miles in either direction, to hunt for arrowheads on a plateau where, local lore had it, there had been a battle between the remnants of the Iroquois Confederacy and a band of Continental soldiers. We never found any arrowheads, just some misshapen fossils of sea creatures—strange distorted shells with scalloped edges, distended coral-like discs bent like reflections in a funhouse mirror and frozen in stone, stones with eye-shaped holes that ran clear through them, the interior surfaces marked by what looked like scales—that had somehow been deposited here, 150 miles from the nearest ocean.

  Once, as Ralph and I picked our way down into a small valley bisected by White Creek, we caught sight of a pure white deer. It sniffed the air as we tumbled out of the woods, trembled, then bounded into the undergrowth. To this day, I’ve never seen another like it in the wild.

  There were a few secret places that Ralph talked about but never actually showed me. He told me that he had seen places where every so often he’d stumble across a spring that for no reason at all might bubble, as if something deep inside it was breathing. There were other places, he said, where the rocks would sometimes give off a peculiar fume, and if you breathed it deeply enough, it was kind of like getting high. I begged him to take me to those places, and once or twice we went looking for them, but we never found them. And after a while, I stopped believing that such things actually existed, convinced that Ralph was making it all up.

  I had mentioned it to my father once, skipping the part about the narcotic nature of the stuff. He told me he had heard the same thing and that the source of the mysterious fumes was natural gas. In fact, Ralph’s grandfather, old Leon Williams, had told my father that from time to time when he was out “witchin’ for water”—dowsing with a stripped willow switch, a practice he continued out of a sense of tradition long after he knew the location of every gurgling spring within miles—he would sometimes come across a small fracture in the ground where natural gas seeped up. It was never much, just a few wisps here and there, and it would quickly vanish.

  AS I GREW OLDER, I found that Ralph and Leon were right. There were pockets of gas in these hills. The guys who made their living drilling local water wells knew all about them. It was not at all unusual for them to stumble across a deposit of natural gas that would force them to stop their operation—for fear that an errant spark might ignite the stuff—long enough for it to dissipate into the air. On the rare occasion that the gas continued to flow, they’d take down their rigs and drill someplace else.

  OTHER THAN THAT, NO ONE—not my family, not anyone else—ever seemed to give the stuff much thought. Back then, it seemed that U.S. oil would always gush freely, and the comparatively limited market for natural gas was flooded with gas that could be obtained easily and cheaply elsewhere in the country, so the general sense among the locals was that no one in their right mind would spend the time or money it would take to chase after the scattered and not particularly promising pockets of gas in these hills.

  But by the early 1970s, things had started to change. What had seemed impossible just a few years earlier was now becoming a harsh reality: the nation was discovering that its own seemingly endless supply of oil and natural gas was becoming scarcer. For decades, academics and government researchers had been quietly anticipating that this would happen. As early as 1956, M. King Hubbert, a geoscientist working for Shell in Houston, had warned that American oil production was headed into a long, slow decline. Using as one of his models the experience of the anthracite coal mines in Pennsylvania, which reached their peak in the 1920s, Hubbert predicted that production from U.S. oil reserves would reach its zenith in the final three decades of the century and then begin to decrease. The theory, which came to be known as Hubbert’s Peak, proved remarkably accurate—1970 was in fact the peak year for American oil production.

  Few Americans at the time had ever heard of Hubbert, and of those who had, few thought there was much cause for concern. After all, there was, it seemed, still a bottomless sea of oil lying beneath the sands of friendly and stable countries all over the world, places like Venezuela, and Iran, run by America’s dear friend the Shah, and Iran’s neighbors, Iraq and S
audi Arabia.

  Then, in 1973, with the first Arab oil embargo, America’s sense of complacency began to crack. The newspapers and nightly news broadcasts were filled with images of gas lines, and the farmers up around Ellsworth Hill began to feel the pain as the cost of diesel fuel for their tractors, fertilizer for their corn, and everything else shot up, while the government-controlled price they got for their milk failed to keep pace. Suddenly, there were a lot more dairy dispersals advertised in the local paper, there were a lot more bargains on antiques to be had, and the shoebox full of money in Cousin Keat’s dining room cupboard was running perilously low.

  THAT DIDN’T MEAN MUCH to me back then. It didn’t mean much to Ralph, either. In 1974, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave Ralph his driver’s license, and a year later, unchastened by that experience, they gave me one. We sought out every challenging stretch of two-lane within ten miles of Ellsworth Hill, often finding ourselves a hill or two over, on a perfectly pitched stretch of tarmac that ran along the creek bottom in the nearby village of Dimock. This was where, after Ralph finished his chores, we’d go to race. Ralph drove a beat-to-hell ’71 Mustang and I had my own baby blue death trap, a ’69 Ford Torino with pot resin layered thick enough on the inside of the windshield to sign your name in it. As we’d travel, he’d be blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd from his 8-track and I’d be blasting the Allman Brothers. But first, we’d fill our tanks and stock up on munchies at Ken Ely’s service station up the road in Springville. It cost about $5 back then to fill your tank—big money for the time—and if we didn’t have the money, as was often the case, Ken was the kind of guy who would give you a dirty look but let you slide until you had the cash—and then we’d head out. You had to be careful back then. There was always the risk that you would come hurtling over a rise and suddenly find yourself nose to ass behind a slow-moving hay wagon or a manure spreader, a leaky wagonload of wet shit sloshing around behind large steel blades that look like the kind of thing Indiana Jones had to slide through in order to get to the Holy Grail. If that happened, you were screwed. If you hit your brakes too hard, your wheels would lock up and your tires would skid on the slick manure and you might well find yourself in a drainage ditch that as likely as not was also filled with spilled manure. In fact, precisely that happened to Ralph. Several times.