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by Andie Author IconMail Icon
Rated: E · Book · None · #2335300
A short story about a young man's journey to realizations of what's important in life.
After an hour of smothering my face with my lowbrow fedora and time worn Carhart jacket, I headed out from under the weeping willow tree. My eyes stung from the Palouse sandblasting. My throat and nose drained sandy fluids. My face, wind burned and raw, felt like I spent all day at the beach instead of few hours in the rolling hills of the Palouse.

Once the dust storm subsided, a common occurrence in the Palouse country, I walked a familiar dusty road. The road is hard packed from the repeated scourings of historical glacial action throughout the Palouse territory. My history is of this land, too; fence posts, wheat fields, rocky volcanic outcroppings . . . and the wind. I wondered as I walked, did the blasting winds erase the initials carved in my fencepost, or did it erase the sign of my childhood memory? The fencepost is irrelevant. The initials are mine. The initials, roughly carved, stand for nothing except a lonely boy's desire to belong somewhere in the vastness.

The wind, the most powerful force in Palouse country, pushes me as I walk the wind blown road. In the Palouse, the wind blows daily, and seasons weld together according the whims of the wind.

I know the wind. It whispers in the rancher's ear. The rancher listens. A primitive language between rancher and wind dresses the growing season; planting, harvesting, plowing, and fallowness., forever dictated by the wind. The rancher knows innately that the winds dry the wheat, siphons deep wells of water, and brings sacred clouds to deliver the land's precious rain.

My family's land, my land . . .ten thousand barb wired acres, irrigated, and life sustaining, are enclosed and captured by roads, acres of land that feed the hungry. Wheat, beef, and dairy land that is being encroached on my who do not know the land, and cannot hear the words of the wind.

Now, as I walk toward the crossroad I gaze north and south. I see the day, three years past when I left the land. I could not wait to leave.

I traded my greasy overalls, flannel shirts, work boots and straw hat for a corduroy jacket, wool slacks and a fedora. I wanted the scholarly look. I was heading east to college. My family celebrated proudly by marking the date on a calendar that pictured tees of orange, yellow, red and brown.

I traded my western ways for a hidden unfamiliar world outside the realms of anything I imagined. I dreamed of fitting into a society of books, exams and professors. What I wanted was classrooms, literary conversation and a niche. What I found was competition without respect for grades or instructors.

Once surrounded by thousands of acres of land, now, I waded through thousands of unidentifiable faces, redundant questions, and false smiles. I played a roll of sorts. I wanted my niche. What I found was a crowd that looked for a score and whatever defined "fun" for the day. Without rules, direction, or responsibility, those with the slickest hairdos and sassiest remarks accepted me as long as I played poker and lost, drank whiskey and staggered, and produced term papers with names besides my own.

Not understanding the manipulation and dishonesty, while compromising my integrity, I often found myself searching. Wandering up down stairwells, through sunless halls I sought logic, precision and reason. Instead, I discovered classrooms filled with dull-eyed students. Students unwilling to release mediocrity stared stupefied at the faceless droning in front of an auditorium. I accepted the unconscious. I compromised to avoid loneliness.

Now, after three years of compromising, I think to myself, "The prodigal returns." Pride stripped and character dragging, I walk over every rock, stone and pothole. I know that I am bitter, and my beleaguered naivete is waning. I nearly lost myself in a world where the man and the land is without measure or value. I lost myself for a magical ideal that existed in my mind only. Even so, after the magic is gone, there is the land and the wind.

Standing at another crossroads, losing myself to thought, again, I choose to exchange my scholarly look for my dirty grease-stained overalls. I thrive on the land and suck the essences in my lungs. The seasons, the land and the wind are inevitable and harmonious.

As I round a turn in the road, I feel a new part of embracing a new part of the land. Something I missed before. I see the seeds beginning to warm in the grounds, slender stalks pushing through the earth into the light, and a gentle wind strengthening all that grows on the land. I left the Palouse. I went east. From the East, I return to my land in the West. I am now always about the land.


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