Celebrating the essence of being “out there.”

By Mark Dillow

The hum of the jet engines pushed me closer to my destination, a midwest city that was home to a customer.  Business took me to a town only an hour away from the birthplace of my mother.

I was hopeful the meetings would conclude in time for me to make a pilgrimage to the old home place, and to visit another important plot of ground before the press of time pulled me back to the airport and busy schedules.

My mother is from a farm on the rolling plains of southern Iowa, near the small town of Humeston. Our ancestors founded the little town, and generations of our family lived and toiled in the surrounding fertile fields to feed a nation. Mom was born during a time in our country’s history when a family farm of one hundred sixty acres could produce enough income to allow the family to have a middle class life.

The town now is much smaller than it once was…a victim of the economics of the modern age.

As a boy, the farm was one of my favorite places to be. My father was a minister, and we often lived several states away, allowing us to visit every other year or so. Nevertheless, I always loved going to the farm. I was a young suburban baby- boomer, and life on the farm was very different than my everyday life. I often day-dreamed about what it would be like to live there all the time. I still do.

Much of who I am has its roots on that farm. My office holds reminders of it. I have a jar of black top soil from the fields of the farm. On my desk is a frame holding an aerial photo of the place taken in the 1950’s. This would be the first time I had been back since my grandmother passed five years before.

The two-lane highway that led me to my destination was no longer familiar to me, even though it was on these roads I learned to drive. First as a young boy behind the wheel of the Ford tractor sitting on grandpa’s lap, then years later as a teenager learning to drive the old Plymouth on the crowned gravel back roads. To my embarrassment, I had to pull out a map to   show me the correct rural route to the farm.

I drove with escelating urgency, as the sun began to sink toward the western horizon. I had a small window of time, and I had to hurry.

Weeks before my dreams had been filled with visions of the old place, after I realized my trip would take me nearby. I dreamed of taking my family there and explaining everything about that little place, and the memories that it holds for me; some from experience, and some passed down by relatives.

They told of the winter the family survived living in the uninsulated clapboard garage because the original house burned to the ground in a fire ignited by a gas stove explosion. They whispered of snows fencepost high, floods in the spring, and the year mom was crowned homecoming queen.

They told of when rural electrification came, and farms were suddenly equipped with mercury vapor lights that shoved back the blackness of Iowa nights with small silver circles of security.

But the farm would have to wait. There was a hill that overlooked the highway that beckoned me first. The hill is opposite a small country golf course with sand greens where I earned a varsity letter on local high school golf team. Many of my family can be found on this hill, and on this rainy fall evening, I found the plots that mark the final resting place of my grandparents.

Grandpa passed on first, a victim of too many years of unfiltered cigarettes and driving tractors in the fields without the protection of a cab, breathing dust and fertilizer and pesticides. Grandma lived to marry again and outlive her second husband, but is now resting by Grandpa, as she should be. The last time I was there was as one of her pall bearers, surrounded by family. This evening I was alone in the field of stone.  We had a short talk, and then I returned to the rental car and drove quickly to spend a short time at the farm before the sun slipped beneath the prairie horizon.

Southward I drove through the town. Past the little diner where grandma used to work, where after golf practice she sometimes made me a cheeseburger. It is now vacant. A place once alive with a jukebox and dancing teenagers now is a somber gray building giving no hint of its former life.

Outside town, I looked for familiar landmarks that would guide me along the rest of my journey. There was the old electrical substation, and turning left took me by the farm of our  nearest neighbor. Now a quarter mile further and a right turn, and I was there.

Time is cruel to the memory of a boy who is now in middle age. Perhaps it is because I can still watch movies of people who have long ago passed on, but who still look young and vigorous on screen. Perhaps we allow ourselves to think we can control time, and it is disturbing when we have to face our foolishness.

The farmyard that once was, now exists only in my memory. The house, barn, and all the outbuildings were gone except the machine shed. The old home place is no longer a home for anything but curing round bales of hay.

I knew the house was gone…it had been thus when I drove past after Grandma’s funeral years before. More accurately it was a pile of rubble, recently torn down. A young couple had moved a mobile home onto the property, and apologized profusely about not having the remains of the old place removed when dad told them who we were and why we were there…which was to get my jar of soil souvenir.

It was a shock then not to see the house, but at least there was still life on the farm. Now five years later, it shocked me again that nearly all traces of habitation were nearly gone. The young couple and their mobile home were gone. There was nothing to indicate that a family was raised there and entire lives were spent scratching a living from the ground. It was also strangely small…a phenomenon I had experienced before when visiting places from my youth, but it always surprises me when it happens.

As I walked around the farm I recalled that this was the place where I learned to hunt. Behind the hen house was where I shot my first rabbit the first time I ever hunted with a gun. Later that day I would also take my first pheasant in one of the fields behind the farmyard.

Alongside the barn I had a makeshift rifle range where I learned to shoot a .22 rifle given to me by an uncle.

The pond to the left of the farm was where I spent many summer days fishing with grubs found under hay bales…and caught my first fish on a fly rod and balsa popper. I still have a photograph of the six pound largemouth bass I caught there when I was five.

The steep bank that runs from the road to the yard was our sledding hill. We used waxed feed sacks because we didn’t have a sled.

Grandpa had a couple of old cars that no longer ran parked on the edge of the farmyard. We cousins pretended to drive them after making sure the interior was free of wasp nests. One was an old Pontiac with an Indian head hood ornament. I think the other was a Buick

In later teen years I came to live on the farm when my father was between churches. I relished the experience, though I know the times were financially hard on my parents. I had the run of the place on the tractor, and spent many days cleaning up damage from a tornado that had skipped over the place a year or so before. I explored the back forty, and the old barn. I learned of the healing power of solace on the prairie when only the wind is there to answer your cries.

This day though, I was not alone on the prairie. My wife was there with me, if only by cell phone, as I tried to describe what I saw, and what I could see through the mist of time. Grandpa and Grandma were there too, I think.

As the sun threw up its last streaks of orange before the approaching night, I turned to leave.  A small flock of Canada geese slid silently into the cornfield across the road from the old home place. I think they were going home too.