Meanwhile, In Kansas

"Did Henry McKitridge die?" 

"Nah," said Dean.  "He just sits at home these days.  Works on whittlin' spoons and chopsticks I imagine."

Jean looked into her empty teacup.  "Sold most of his farm to the neighbor, the young guy.  Henry's older'n any of us.  He deserves to retire, poor bird."

In downtown Sharon Springs, on the western edge of Kansas, a handful of aging locals sat in Dooley's Restaurant, as they did most Wednesdays.  There was some frost on the ground outside, but most of the snow had melted or been blown away already.  February was always cold, but this one seemed to be more wet than frozen, which made for ugly fields and soggy lawns.  The ever-present wind was blowing, of course.

Dean and Jean Metcalf sat together on one of the benches.  Across the table, past the carafe of coffee and the plastic flowers were Randy James and Hank Marshall, both farmers.  Sam Baird, the pharmacist was there too, and so was Johnny Redd, the cattleman.  Johnny hadn't raised any beef in ten years, but still considered himself a cowboy to the bone.

Dean and Jean, contentedly married for over forty years, were drifting dangerously close to their seventies, fully aware that the routines of their weeks and months and years had been cycling repetitively for a couple of decades.  Both were tired, but took life with enough sarcasm and critique that they couldn't call themselves unhappy. 

All half-dozen characters had finished their small-town breakfast and the empty plates waited to be cleared, smelling of syrup and bacon.  Johnny Redd said "There's too many farmers leaving town."

"They're not leaving town, Johnny," said Dean.  "They're just passing on, giving up the farm for wings and harps and halos up there."

"Well," said Sam, who had been dealing in medications and hokey greeting cards since Kennedy's inauguration, "the trouble is, the kids ain't sticking around.  See, if the kids bothered to become farmers, we'd have plenty of folks in the field, but they all head out to college and don't come back.  Last I saw your kids," he nodded to Dean and Jean, "was a couple of Christmases ago, wasn't it?" 

Jean nodded.  "Our daughter's got a family.  Our son would have been a good farmer, I suppose, but he's doing good in school.  I don't think he'll want to come out here to live.  Why would he?  Dean can handle the farm on his own anyway, with the tractor drivin' itself and everything."

"You two gonna retire like Johnny Redd here did?" asked Sam.

"I ain't retired," said Johnny Redd.  "I just ain't felt like keepin' any cattle for a spell.  Thinkin' I might get a new herd comin' up here.  Next year."

Dean smiled at Johnny.  "Yeah.  I don't know.  I imagine we'll just sell off the fields to the neighbor.  He's already got a couple thousand acres of his own, and we lease him another couple hundred.  It's all the same wheat and hay anyway.  There's no reason for us to keep separate operations these days.  He's a good farmer.  A little snide sometimes, but not a bad guy."

"Snide?  He's only really pleasant in the morning before he starts drinking," said Jean.  She hadn't had many good interactions with the neighbor over the years and they generally didn't look each others' way when they were near the fencelines.  The Metcalf's house and the neighbor's house were nearly a mile away, so it wasn't hard to avoid contact.

Randy, who kept a farm a few miles west of Sharon Springs and grew more sunflowers than anything, said, "You know, wasn't too long ago everyone had their little homesteads out here.  My granddad used to tell me how it was all 80-acre plots, west to Colorado and east to Lawrence.  He came out here when he was a boy, when his folks fell for the whole 'westward expansion' package.  Lived through the Dust Bowl.

"He told me what it was like to watch everything dry up and see everyone he knew pack up and get out of here.  Most everyone left, but our family stuck it out, raising what they could.  All them other families left all them homesteads here, just empty and bare, and the bank claimed most of them.  My family had a little money and the bank sold us a bunch of little farms cheap.  Same went for your family, Dean."

Dean nodded.  "Little farms got pretty big pretty quick.  Lot of folks out on the coasts who don't like farms our size these days.  They think we're too big, that we're corporate and bad and drinking chemicals in our coffee every day."  He smiled at the thought of Roundup Lattes. 

Randy continued, "Hell.  But then, next generation, half the kids went off to college or to California, and didn't come back.  All my granddad's peers started dying off, selling the land to the neighbors.  Same thing with my dad's generation.  Then mine.  Those of us that stuck around saw all this land come up for sale, cheap.  What were we gonna do, let it go stale?  Just sit there while we grow ten-acre gardens?  Wheat won the war back in 1918, and hippies still eat bread and Cheerios, don't they?"

The six patrons sat quiet for a few seconds.  Randy stared at the fake petunias on the table, obviously riled.  He took societal accusations personally.

Hank, the other wheat farmer, finally said, under his breath, "My kids aren't coming back."

Jean said, "Ours either."

Randy pursed his lips, imagining his family surviving those dust storms, growing wheat for World Wars I and II, feeding the world, going through generations of Allis Chalmers tractors, John Deers, and now big red Case combines.

"Mine either," he said, barely audibly.

A Seed in the Mail

Avery sat under the same storm cloud as Erika.  Erika, however, was over a hundred miles away; the cloud was as big as the entire Northwest.  On a Tuesday morning he heard the postman rattle down the gravel road in the rain.

He put on his raincoat and boots and dashed out to the mailbox.  It was his day off, but the nursery at which he lived and worked was waiting for some rare seeds, ordered from overseas, and after all the trouble of international trade laws and customs, he wasn't about to let them sit in the cold, damp mailbox any longer than they had to.

The mailbox was welded to an old shovel in the ground and was emblazoned with the words, "Nightshadow Nursery."  The "O" in the name was a fat, red tomato.  Avery opened the squeaky door of the box and did not find any packages from Norway; he grabbed the pile of envelopes and solicitations and quick-stepped back into the house, shaking himself off on the porch.

It was all bills and advertisements that day, except for the long white envelope with his name on it.  It was addressed, in script, to "THE Avery Mason," and had Erika's Portland return address.  The stamp featured Calvin and Hobbes, his favorite comic characters.  He poured his second cup of coffee and headed back to his bedroom to open and read it immediately.  Coffee and a letter on a rainy day:

"Avery-

 How goes the growing in these winter months?  And what, exactly, creates a nightshadow?  Is it like a normal shadow, cast when the moon is full and the evening is bright?  Or is it the opposite, a ray of light cast when it's pitch black outside?  I suppose it would be like a bright, glowing aura, visible only when there are no fluorescent or solar distractions.

The rainy months are here, obviously.  I should be surprised if this letter makes it to your hands dry.  But the weather is suspiciously warm and I wonder if we will ever have that late winter freeze.  At this point all of the fruit trees in the city seem to think it's time for Spring.  They are waking up, budding, blossoming, and I fear that we'll lose our fruit crops this year when the temperature drops and freezes the poor flowers right off.  I should stock up on apples before they become as valuable as oil.

Why is it that half the people our age are heading back to farms right now?  Not even heading back, just heading to them!  Most of us were not raised on farms.  We have no land, we have no childhood memories of our mothers making jam and our fathers chopping wood.  Despite that, our entire generation seems to be advocating for food, spending their vacations working - for free! - on farms around the world.  Why do we drift to the soil after twenty-some years on concrete?  Why are we fascinated by worms when we have been educated on the Internet?

It bothers me sometimes.  There is too much shouting.  There is too much "anti-everything".  There is too much rhetoric and roundabout rambling advocating for changes in our food system.

I'm no exception.  I'm from Boston for Crissake.  But for some reason I decided to learn about food and soil.  While my parents told me about economics I was fascinated by cation exchange capacity, nematodes, and nitrogen fixation.  I was fixated on goats, though before moving here I'd never seen one outside of the tiny ones at the zoo (which are still adorable, mind you).

Too much yelling.  That's the problem.  I'm no advocate for big business in agriculture, but I know that it must exist.  I know that there are good reasons that five-thousand-acre wheat farms exist, that ten-thousand-chicken barns are all over the country.  More people eat food than grow it, so somebody must produce, produce, produce.

Yesterday, despite the rain, there was a march in the city, protesting big agriculture.  "Down with corporate farms!" the signs said.  "Get small or get out!"  "Bring the culture back to agriculture!"  

And yet, most of the young people, the folks our age, want to create our small farms and stick around the places in which we're comfortable.  There must be a thousand CSAs around Boston now.  Hundreds around Portland, who-knows-how-many supplying San Francisco and Seattle with vegetables and meat.  

But something in the equation doesn't look right to me.  If every new farmer sets up shop near the cities and in these hubs of support, what happens in the midwest?  There is so much land out there!  So much fertile, deep soil!  I mean, the plains are where this whole mess began, with thousands of small homesteads.  Where did they go?  Most of the farmers went west with the dust bowl, and more of them left with each generation.  Now it's all giant farms, run by small families, and the families are getting smaller out there.

If we (I say "we" meaning our whole freaking generation) are going to advocate for small farms, homesteads, and the breakup of the massive farms around the US, I think we need to go back to the Midwest, the plains, the prairie.  We need to get out of our comfort zone and see what we can do on those massive, open canvases of grain.  The biggest complaint, at least amongst the farmer wannabes that I know, is that they can't afford land.  What if we all go where land is cheap, and we go together?

What must happen next is this.  We need to clear out of the cities.  We need open spaces.  All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from.  We need to repopulate Kansas.

Keep in touch!

With love and greenbeans-

Erika"

Moonshine for the Marlows

Different forests hold different fortunes.

In South Dakota, if you are hiking in the woods and you discover sluice boxes and other gold panning equipment, you are advised to leave it alone.  In Kentucky you'd best keep walking if you find a marked hillside covered in ginseng, and in Oregon sweet spots for chantrelles and other mushrooms are guarded secrets.  There are unspoken rules and codes in the forest, and it is the fault of the ignorant if they break them.

In North Carolina the things to avoid are other people's moonshine stills, marvels of simplicity and creativity that have been passed through generations of mountain families.

Anya Marlow, back home from her wander to the Pacific Northwest, was in the familiar grove near her uncle's house.  It was late evening, uncomfortably close to morning, and the time-pocked copper parts of the old still flickered in firelight.  The old contraption sat in a twenty-five foot grove, surrounded by mountain laurel and young hickory.  Tyrer Creek swished and rolled nearby in the darkness.

There were only a couple of working stills left in the area; most had been stripped for parts or left to rust and decay years ago, but the Marlows were a reminiscent bunch for all of their bravado and intensity.  They fired up the boiler a couple of times a year and experimented with mashes of apples, corn, pears, or other creative sugar sources.  At every moonshine meeting, somebody was sure to remind Billy Marlow of his famously disastrous inspiration to use his bumper crop of tomatoes in the still.  "Bill's lucky he didn't kill off the Marlows that year!" his brother Tom would always say.

Anya was the only woman present, as usual.  Her mother and the other ladies, though only one generation apart from her, tended to uphold the perception that these events were for the men.  Another unspoken code of the forest.  Anya had no trouble breaking codes, especially since she'd been coming to this still for twenty four years.

Tom was her father, and obviously so.  She shared his black curls and his slight nose, and they wore their hair at the same shoulder length.  He sat with her on a two-by-four bench, waiting for the mason jar to come around the circle again.  Fifteen other people were present, including two toddlers, three teenagers (who were over by the creek, no doubt trying to figure out if there were any possible way to rebel against this family), and Cort Crispin, one of her cousins.  The rest were older men:  the five Marlow brothers; Rand Marks, the doctor; Stephan and Micah Yoder, the dairy farmers; and Marvin Huynh, the Vietnam-born actor.  Marvin was turning seventy-nine that night.

Tom asked Anya, "Did you fall in love with anyone up there?"

"Of course I did," she answered.  "But Washington is a long ways away."

"Not many fellows worth having these days if they ain't willing to come courtin' from a distance."

"I was lost in the woods up there, you know.  This guy and his friend came out of nowhere and rescued me after a few days of me wandering around."

"Oh, a hero?"  Tom received the mason jar from Marvin.  It was getting low, another quart sank low into the bellies of the party.  "What'd he do when y'all got back to civilization?"

"He took me dancing."

"What kind?"

"Contra.  He was pretty good.  But Washington's got a few moves to learn before it could compete with Carolina."  Anya took the jar from her father and drank the apple moonshine from it.  It looked just like water, but it felt like fizz and fire and fancy as it traveled down her throat.  She screwed the lid on and handed it to Micah, who went to the still for a refill.  "He wants to farm."

"Great," said Tom.  "You know how to pick 'em."

"You did alright," she said.  "For a farmer, I mean."

He put his arm around her waist and she laid her head on his shoulder.  He stared at the fire for the best part of a minute, thinking about his family and listening to Tyrer Creek.  "I did.  I do.  I know."

The Writer

Erika was surrounded by the smell of roasted coffee beans.  On the cedar table in front of her was the lengthy letter that she had been writing all morning.  The eggshell paper didn't look quite right to her, covered in the cheap blue ink from the pen labeled, "Verne's Hardware."  Her laptop was on the table as well, also looking out of place in front of the cafe's stone fireplace.  

She had been told that she spent too much time and money in coffee shops.  By her mother mostly.  An hour in the morning, maybe two?  Was that really too much?  "And it's not like I have any other vices," she'd respond.  "No car, no debt, I rarely drink alcohol, and, thank God, no children."

Cafes were her offices, really.  To rent an office space would be hundreds of dollars each month, but to "rent" a table once a day, to allow herself a space to write; that came out to just two or three dollars each day.  Cafes were where she wrote.

"Balance and Swing," was the title of her latest novel.  On her computer were thirteen unfinished novels, twenty-five short stories, and three nearly-polished screenplays.  She had yet to fully complete any one of her writing projects, but she was in no hurry.  She was nowhere near thirty yet, and her mother hadn't been published until she was forty years old.

People knew Erika as a writer, which made her smile.  "What do you do?" she would be asked at potlucks and conferences.  "I write," she said.  "Oh, what do you write?" was usually the next question.  Conscious of the intrigue, she would smile and tell them, "Words.  All kinds of them."  The query, she figured, was not, "How do you make your money?"  It was, "What do you do?"  She wished that more people would identify what they do...she didn't often care that someone worked in a restaurant or a telemarketing company.  She wanted to know what they did.

But she had learned some time ago that probing too deeply was not a good idea.  She liked to believe that everybody in the world had some creative outlet, that every person she passed on a highway was headed home to paint a picture, to play a cello, to work on some private equation that would solve questions of the universe.  In the mind of Erika, mankind spent most of its free time productively.  Even at the cafes, she would eyeball all of the other young people with their computers and imagine that every screen was full of multi-syllable words or epic photography.

She had also learned not to look at those people's screens when she walked past to the restroom.  Most of the time they were staring at endless torrents of Facebook updates.  Her imagination was populated by a far more ambitious bunch of people than the real world.

That's where Erika spent her morning and, often, her evenings.  Writing.  It would pay off someday.  She would either change the world or get rich.  Preferably both.  As it happened, it was in the cafe nearest to her house that she wrote something that would change the world.  It was misty outside and the city streets were full of puddles left over from a wet evening.  She watched a white and blue TriMet bus splash through the intersection outside and looked at her computer.  She looked at the tall brick buildings and the towers across the river.  She thought about food and farms and soil and cities and wished she were living in a small town, the more rural the better.

"What must happen next," she wrote, "is this.  We need to clear out of the cities.  We need open spaces.  All of these people want to farm and feed the world, but can't find the land to do it from.  We need to repopulate Kansas."

With that line she finished the letter to her old friend, Avery Mason, and packed it up into an envelope to mail.