Wings on Fire
In l974, we went "back to the land" in Meridian Idaho. Not that we'd ever been there before. And not that we understood exactly what that meant. To go back to the land was a dream, the ideal life maybe, for the two of us, having survived with our marriage intact at the beginning of the seventies. In Madison, Wisconsin, with anti-war demonstrations, the hippie era, the chaos of it all, we had become politically crazy, or at least unstable. We had read too many subversive texts (From the Land and Back, Five Acres and Independence, and The Whole Earth Catalogue). We thought too much about a simpler life rather than the big city lives we had grown up with, and we dreamt way too much about going to a smaller town where we could have more space around us, like a rural setting in Idaho.
"How could you," my mother said over the phone," get all that education, all those degrees, and still end up on the farm."
"It's the west, Mom, and it's called a ranch," I said, correcting her. "Well, a small ranch of five acres," I said, correcting myself.
My Polish mother and my Italian father didn't get it. They saw us going backwards in time, thrown into an unfortunate reverse set of possibilities, one that reminded my mother especially of my Polish grandmother on a farm near Warsaw. But I didn't see this woman doing backbreaking work, bent over rows of beets or carrots. Instead, I saw her as a young woman, strong, growing up there, changing with the times, heading west. It didn't matter to me that my only memories were of how I saw her in her seventies, her richly wrinkled face, with wisps of gray hair, floating free from her red baboushka. I had no trouble imagining her tending an abundant garden, milking cows or planting wheat or barley. Okay, so she had turned her back on the farm, the cows, and the crops. She too was searching for a different kind of life.
Via a freighter, Grandma landed at Ellis Island in l908, hoping to hang her own hat on a brass post in a house in a city. Her dreams had shifted to self-sufficiency, independence, freedom from the land, from the old country..
Not for us though. Paying inadvertent homage to an ancestral past, we wanted to go back to the land. Overeducated, (six college degrees between the two of us) with a passion for books, we became novice land lovers. At thirty years of age, our childhood imaginations of the west were still fully intact. The frontier held shimmering images of cowboys and cowgirls with cap guns as six shooters.. A real estate agent walked us across a piece of property, showing us a not too detailed map of the Oregon Trail, cutting across one corner of it. Some money down and a land contract bought us a place in history. I was convinced.
It was the kind of space that didn't irrigate well (not that anybody for the last twenty years had tried) and one that you couldn't even see with all the overgrown weeds and alfalfa with roots going down deep, deep, deep to water they found on their own. It was a huge trapezoid that had to be burned from green to brown for us to be able to see what was there.
The day of the big burn we hoisted new shovels over shoulders not made for them and grabbed the rented burner. Making a noise like some prehistoric monster, the wand on the burner had a mind of its own. With flames roaring down the irrigation ditch, the fire took off leaving us in the dust of dirt thrown from shovels when we tried to keep the fire on some sort of path. Moving with the flames, created back burns.
Anxious to see the lay of the land, we burned up the weeds, old and alfalfa, and were pleased that we were half-finished. Then the fire chose to make its own path, accompanied by the not yet understood daily westerly wind, and the fire headed out right across our property line to the neighbor's field.
"Quick, where are the hoses? " my husband asked, really to no one in particular. Who had a hose that was 700 feet long?
"Hoses?" My question hung in the smoke. You just can't know enough before you start a burn. By the time we were finished, we had obliterated the landscape of green, both on our property and a quarter of the one to the east. All lay black. Such a large empty space. Quiet. Burnt ash makes no sound in the wind.
Leftover smoke from smoldering grass drifted across our faces and off towards the Boise front, where Shafer Butte wore a light cap of snow. Some of the grass had turned to grey thin lines of ash curled in on themselves.. The field mice had disappeared, heading east, before the line of fire and the smoke. We had scourged the earth. We were so pleased with ourselves, with grimy shirts and shorts, and slightly burnt tennis shoes. Red bandannas, tied around our heads, were caked with sweat. We were ready for our next adventure.
Which meant that we needed a place to live. You can't just go to the land, without a place to live on the land. Over five years, we built a strong study Cape Cod home in the middle of the desert, with small windows facing west, an unplanned cooling feature along with the basement.
In l975, during the first winter in the shell of that house, the wind whistled through boards. A cube of butter on a plate, sitting on a plywood counter, froze. It's hard to spread frozen butter on toast made on top of a Coleman stove. Blackened toast doesn't taste so good that way either. Temperatures dropped to zero at night and climbed up into the teens by late in the day. I dreamt of a house with several fireplaces, wood cracking, heat, and indoor pipes with water running.
My parents bought us a refrigerator because they couldn't stand that we were using a cooler with ice and leaving other food outside in a world we labeled The Big Freeze.
Cold too much for too long, we voted against waiting for some sort of proper central heating system. A wood stove took over, loaded with coal, warmed our lives. We never thought that hard hunks of coal would keep us so warm. My mother knew and told us a thing or two, without my asking.
"Grandma has a coal stove, "she said over the phone. "In the basement of her home. Remember? The coal bin hasn't been used much since she's had the house modernized with a gas furnace. She wouldn't think of using the stove for heat anymore."
"Mom,"I said, "the stove works just fine. We're pretty warm most of the time. We can cook on it, and we don't have to use the camping stove anymore." Somehow I forgot to tell her that we also had electricity, black wires that snaked through studs, one specifically for the toaster. The other for ceiling light bulbs.
My mother wasn't through talking. She talked about how Grandma cooked on a coal stove and how she hated the gas stove upstairs in the real kitchen. The new stove never did bake good bread. Ah, the old stove. At last, I thought, my mother was coming over to our side.
With some insulation, wall boards, and a fire down below, we curled up, cocooned in our long johns in a bed with a white down comforter, strangely like Grandma's rust-colored one on her old feather bed. .
I waited for water. My husband plumbed. Matches, blow torches, copper tubing. Water finally running, but only cold. A heavy cast iron white tub delivered upstairs could be filled with hot water from pots on the stove. Unfortunately, the tub wouldn't stay warm, not like the tub with a special heater, that we have now in our Boise home. Still, we could take lukewarm baths and then voila, more pipes and then hot showers.
Outside, spring came and went, and our acreage was filled with blown-in tumbleweeds that stood raked in piles over twelve feet high. By then, we were seasoned fire fighters, with water hooked up to hoses. We had blue work shirts, long pants, clunky books, gloves, and his/her own favorite shovels.
Somehow, we had become more cautious around a blaze, more respectful of the power of flames. We were part of the culture of the west. We knew about range fires first hand, and we knew that even if there were no trees to burn, fires could sweep through so fast, that you'd never have time to figure out what to do if you were caught in the middle of a field burn. Summer newspapers highlighted fires and fire danger. And so we became afraid, and rightfully so, of misguided fires.
So much so that when the foothills were ablaze one summer day and a sky glowed red with heat and pungent smoke filled our nostrils, we convinced ourselves that the fire could jump the Boise River.
"Well, Boise would have to burn first," I said.
"Well, yeh, it could -- all those frame houses with wooden shingles," my husband said.
We looked up at our own roof and pulled the hoses out from where they lay perpetually coiled. But you cannot seriously figure out distances easily here when the land flattens out and goes on forever to the horizon. That which we thought was so near was so far away that planes dropping retardant were mere dots against the sky.
Year after year, until year V on the ranch, we burned off the old oat hay, the crop, to which both came to realize we were allergic. Finally, we moved to something more civilized, more permanent, as we understood that the burns, the black, the haze settling in, were just not us. Even though shovels no longer weighed heavy on our shoulders, other objects, like irrigation tubes kept us in l03 degree heat for too long each time we had to set pipes.
Yet, we were hooked to the land, craving self sufficiency (with two other full-time jobs). From the south along the Snake River, rumblings of the wine industry in its infancy reached our ears. We read books on grape cultivating and grape grafts. A new crop. We would be part of a burgeoning industry of Idaho growers. Twenty seven hundred grape vines in quart milk containers entered the ranch and took their places in not so straight rows of steel posts, trellises and guy wires.
We became vintners with a crop that, we were sure would yield a great harvest. Wine grapes were going for a thousand dollars a ton.. Quick calculations meant that four acres would generate us a good chunk of money indeed. Such is the wish of dreamy academics to imagine such a thing possible.
We bought a green and yellow, repossessed John Deere, with all its parts and some to spare. Running on diesel, the tractor flew down the field with smoke curled up in small plumes and away from its exhaust. We had it made and just had to watch the money roll in. And we would be somewhat more self-sufficient. I was convinced.
Somehow, though, as we hoped for a miracle crop, we must have known that the land could only do so much for us. From that field of green vines, we could look back and see that huge shapes concealed our home. Over seventy-five trees and shrubs blocked the bright desert sun. Bright red and orange tulips flopped on tall stems close the house, white star magnolias touched a northeast corner, lazy locust flowers hung in huge spicy clumps from trees shading a vegetable garden.. A Japanese pond with bridge and water fall whirlpooled light and outlines of gold and orange koi. We had filled the space of our lives.
Into that space, two wood ducks with fiery red eyes would land in the pond every March..
So each year, we waited for them.
They haven't come yet? They should have been here by now? My questions bounced across the thin sheet of ice over water. They came. A bullfrog entertained us in April. We learned to wait patiently for his chant.
We took bets on who would hear the first meadowlark Pheasants that had avoided hunters each October, squawked through the spring and summer. And the grapes grew. The tractor kept the weeds down. The drip system kept the grapes happy.
The first harvest time in the cold snap of a September frost came too fast for us. With neighbors, we picked bunches quickly. Held in our hands for just seconds, a grape clusters became treasures in weight and light and color. The first crop of Chardonnay went to St. Chappelle.
The crop wasn't big that year. From then on, sometimes there was a good year, sometimes not. And the prices dropped. More grape production in the Napa Valley, Washington, and Idaho halved the price of grapes. More zero degree temperatures and little water in winter meant ground kill. With grapes killed to the ground, we started over, bringing the grapes up again on the trellis from small green vines poking from the earth. We were two years away from a crop.
Around our house, trees grew past twenty-five feet. Lilacs hit ten feet. Violets and violas perfumed the Japanese garden. And we put in more and more plants. We lived on a desert "oasis," a place that diffused the heat and acted as a green barrier against surrounding dry fields, and firebreak for flames that might come from the west. Sprinklers watered the garden. Forget-me-nots near the breeze way wall came back year after year, more profuse with time passing.
The years went by. Tiger swallowtails, bits of yellow flew brightly around under the canopy of sycamores and Carolina poplars. Then one day, we woke up. Something was different. It was summer, and we walked out into the hot desert air, and then turned back under the shade of the trees. We sat near the pond and we talked about the land, the grapes, the last crop.
Well, it wasn't as good as the one before, and the crop before that not as good as the one before that. The winters seemed more severe. We were old hands, pioneers meting out the hard punishment, berating ourselves for not being able to subdue the land, take it over, make it our own.
All the leaves would be falling soon. Like all farmers, we were constantly thinking of the next season, working and worrying ahead of it It would take days to rake millions of leaves from sycamores, maples, poplars, and locusts. At thirty, days seemed to stretch to infinity, but at fifty-four, they ended too quickly for us. We thought perhaps we could leave the land, that we had been somewhere, figured something out..
Later, in that summer of l997, a flicker of a shadow crossed the lawn. I looked up to the bright orange and black wings of a Monarch butterfly. I walked below it, dazzled by this color in all the green, and I followed it around the Japanese garden. As I walked around our house and stood at the edge of the pond, I saw another. Then another. Then more. Wings on fire. Seven butterflies danced in the sky over my head. Psyche, I thought, our souls on the wing. It was the perfect time to think about saying goodbye, to let go of the land.
Now I look down at the city of Boise or straight out at the sky, brushed with red and orange, a touch of aqua above lavender. The ridges of the Owyhee Mountains peek out from the distance. Most mornings, a pink dawn flames across the sky. With binoculars, I am on lookout, checking, just seeing what is out there really. Sometimes I see wisps of smoke. Fires from barbeques mostly, but once a house going up -- terrifying smoke in the distance.
I am keeper of the sky, like anyone who wishes to stretch their arms wide. The foothills that I saw from our country home for so many years, are now familiar terrain where we walk. The rounded hills surround me, pull me towards them, but we don't need to lay claim to them. Far to the west, the wide open sky caps the horizon line, where we lived on five acres that we once called home. We paid our dues, farmed the land, felt our earth beneath our feet.
Memories of the pioneer spirit go with me. Some wind must have pushed us to the land, propelled us forward to the years spent there. Now a gentle breeze moves strands of my hair, beginning to turn grey. It is the same wind. I am convinced.
