Month: January 2022

No longer a young man

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

II.

You rise in the dark in your rent house and turn off the air conditioner because you cannot abide the tyranny of noise in the morning. Greek yoghurt for breakfast to help you digestion, Ice in the water jug, a pickle in the lunch bucket, a naproxen for the chronic pain, and out to the truck to get to the field.

Later, sometime between false and real dawn, you lean against the bed of your work truck, enjoying the cool of the metal, looking up at Orion in the sky. An audiobook talks quietly from the phone in your pocket while you put together your telemetry equipment. As Orion fades away, you can begin to see the prairie surrounding you. Picking up a signal on the receiver, you start walking across the range. The signal is weak, so you hike up the canyon, homing in on the animal on which you put a radio collar months ago. As you walk, you see the plants, unconsciously naming them as you go. Helianthus, Ziziphus, curtipendula, Prosopis. Sunflower, lotebush, sideoats, mesquite. Where they are and how they are arranged tell you a story about the history of the place. You often think about how little you have changed while not realizing how many more names you have for your world, how much more the landscape tells you than it did before.  You reach where the canyon rises up to become the caprock, and the light on your equipment tells you the GPS data on your study animal has downloaded to your tablet. Another set of data points from which you’ll tell the world how prairie wildlife uses the landscape.

Since you are so close, you pick a deer trail and climb the escarpment, leaving the rolling plains for the llano estacado. By the time you reach the top, your sweat is salt and the wind hot and coarse across it. Catching your breath at the top, you look out across the dryland cotton that comes to the edge of the caprock. There’s Amaranthus along the edge and towards the field’s center. Amaranths. Pigweed. Carless weed. Wildlife food in a sea of fiber and ecological desert. Native and noxious. You wonder how many miles you walked chopping cotton back then compared to how many miles you hike doing wildlife biology now?

Some of those memories are blurry and faded, but you remember the sweat and the waiting and the want. How many rows walked, how miles of ditches dug, how many long nights working a job you hated to get from then to now? You’re unsure, but the math says it took you fifteen years longer to get to college than your classmates. You turn your back and mind to the cotton and past to use the high ground to scan through the other frequencies of your radio collars.

Eventually the first part of the day is over, and you load up in your work truck to head back to the office to analyze your data. The hours spent driving between study sites doesn’t bother you. You live in your head a lot of time, so for hours at a time you compose stories in your head, think about all the jobs you’ve had and the ones you still want, what life was like before college left you stranded in the gulf between your first social circle and what is supposed to be your current one. More and more you think about a tiny shack someplace quiet with no pressing need to be anywhere in the morning but on the porch watching the sun rise. You’re still waiting. For another house in the country, for a job with fewer hours, more time in a tent, less time being in charge. You’ve learned your patterns enough to know you feel more feral at certain times of the year. You no longer quit jobs for the sake of the going. So, you’ll shrug off the urge to go do something different. Back at the office you’ll pour yourself a glass of unsweetened tea, sit down and write what you’ve spent the past years learning. You’ll not stop waiting.

Not today at least.

As a young man

/ Rowdy / Leave a comment

I.

You rise in the dark just as your trailer house room is becoming cool enough to sleep, the hot summer night breeze feeling cool on your sweat. As you fry an egg for breakfast, the radio says it is 84 degrees. Ice in the water jug, a pickle in the lunch bucket against the heat cramps, and out to the truck to pick up Luis.

Later, sometime between false and real dawn, you lean against the bed of your truck, enjoying the cool of the metal, looking up at Orion in the sky. Luis and Anthony talk quietly about sports while you just listen, trying to soak up the coolness from the truck, storing it for the day. Eventually, as Orion fades away, you can begin to see the cotton plants in the field. Picking an eyeful of rows, you take your hoe and begin walking across the field. Near the field edges you hoe up Johnson grass, but as you move to the middle of the field it is mostly careless weed. You don’t know that in the coming years you’ll have latin names for carless weed. You only know the farmer is paying you a quarter under minimum wage to walk up and down his field to kill it. A half mile later you are on the other end of the field, and you move down to pick up another eyeful of rows to tend on your way back up the field. The more rows you can cover, the fewer miles walked. By now, the sun is fully over the horizon and the little bit of cool on the breeze is gone. The wind is picking up, but you know it will feel hot and coarse across the salt on your skin.

This is how you spend the first part of the day, leaving footprints in the soft red dirt as you trudge back and forth across the field. You spend the day hoeing weeds, composing stories in your head, thinking about all the jobs you could have while watching the heat mirages and dust devils in the distance. You wonder how far you would get if you took the term “chopping cotton” literally and spent the day hoeing up the cotton plants instead of the weeds. It would be slow going; would Luis and Anthony only notice what you were doing because you were falling behind? How many rows could you kill before the famer drove by and noticed? Sometime just before lunch, a small dust devil swirls through, snatching the large straw hat from Luis’ head and throws it down the field towards you. Your legs are heavy and tired as you jog to get it.

Eventually the first part of the day is over, the three of you load up in your truck, and it is back into town for a midday nap. You eat cold fried chicken for lunch, and since the trailer house is too hot for rest, you rinse off with a cold shower and lay in the shade on the back porch to read and nap. A couple hours spent in other worlds gets your mind right. You get up to go to Polly’s for a glass of tea before going back out to the field for the late afternoon bout of cotton chopping.

At the restaurant, you wave to your farmer who is sitting in the corner with his tea and cronies while you sit there with Luis, drinking sweet tea, waiting for the rest of the day to start. You don’t realize it yet, but you are always waiting for something. For the weather to cool down. For the weather to warm up. For the next construction job to start. For the time to be right to go to college. For there to be a cool place to sleep. For life to start. You’re dragged out of waiting to hear the man paying you four dollars an hour under the table tell his cronies that a good Christian man always pays his fair share. Last week you heard him say he couldn’t understand how a man could stand to be on welfare, and he just wouldn’t do it, and it was a shame his tax dollars went to it.

. . .

The air conditioner in your truck was broken a decade before it was yours, so on the way back to the barn, you hold your hand out feeling the wind while you look over the fields rushing by. You notice Luis has taken a piece of old shoestring and tied it to his hat to save it from the wind. In the field, the sun has canted towards the west, and it is more difficult to get started than it was in the morning. You stretch your legs while leaning against the hot truck bed, grab the file to refresh the edge on your hoe, and then it is back to walking up and down the rows until there isn’t enough light to see. You don’t mind the walking so much. You also live in your head for a lot of the time, so for hours at a time even the boredom doesn’t drag you down too much. But you’re still waiting for something while you imagine what the country looked like before the prairie was plowed into contour lines. You still want to throw down your hoe and go somewhere else just for the sake of the going. Just as you truly lose the light, you get back in the truck to take Luis home. Another day and another forty dollars. Tomorrow is Friday, so you’ll present yourself at the back door —never the front door— of the farmhouse for the $200 due you for the week.