We city people know so little about the history of the land on which we have, mindlessly, built out houses, especially here in the South-West where nearly every excavation reveals the remains of the people who were here before us. In junkyards, I see the carcasses of old tractors, twisted and worn, cattle haulers with manure and straw still in them, and the bent remains of farming tools whose names I don’t know and whose uses everyone has forgotten. Another example of our forgotten and neglected past.
This arid, high, cold land was mistreated by generations of immigrants from the East and from Europe who scraped off the topsoil to plant corn until the topsoil blew away, the land was depleted and the newcomers went away, leaving desolation behind them. The Swedes on the high plains knew to use the old method, using a planting stick and a string to make holes for seeds a certain number of feet apart. When there was rain—and there was rain, then—the seeds sprouted and grew without need of further irrigation, fertilizer or noxious sprays. The richness of these plains farms is the background for some of Willa Cather’s finest novels, such as “O Pioneers.”
And then came industrial farming, corporate-owned, with mammoth machinery in which the driver sits, enclosed, air-conditioned, listening to his podcasts.
As we work to restore the depleted soil on South Pass Ranch, we sometimes finds remnants from those long-gone farmers whose names and histories we don’t know. Today we found the iron fragment from an axel, made for a Case tractor, broken and rusted. I was astonished to see on this remnant a tiny border of blooms, carved at the rim, actually not carved but created by a prototype mold.
Perhaps an immigrant Italian worker, hired for the price of a meal and sleeping in a barn, brought from his homeland a knowledge and love of modest decorations. So even a hard-working tractor bore tiny evidence of his skill.
I am touched but also inspired by this imaginary scenario. The women on these ranches worked from dawn to dusk, perhaps found a bit of surcease and comfort in the detail of the pattern of a knitted wool sock or the garland of roses on a precious porcelain cup, the only one remaining from an East Coast grandmother’s set.
So we all live from and by details: the summer’s harvest of gourds in an old basket, set in the corner of a stone-faced window, the long-ago cast horseshoes lined up on a wooden bench.
This broken fragment means more to me than the vaunted collections of art I’ve seen in many museums, here and all over the world—this humble evidence of respect for handiwork and the human need to embellish.
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