Keep Your Manure...

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 1

Keep Your Manure...

Laura Paruzzi wheeled her old Honda Accord on loose gravel around another section corner. An Iowa cornscape lay low, gray and tan on both sides of the Williams County road. Dirty snow drifts hiding in the west ditch somehow reflected her unease. Fine white dust sifted into the car as a raw northwest wind raced her south over Grant Wood-like hills.

“Damn, I’m late!” Laura said to no one. She glanced at scribbled directions and the county map beside her, and then at her watch, 2:30 p.m. She was already a half hour past her appointment with Alex Murphy. Perhaps this excursion to scout a field trip location for her third-graders come April was not such a good idea. Nasty day.

The Honda nosed downward. Laura focused her attention on the narrow bridge over the little creek below. Steep hill. She backed a booted foot off the gas, and looked left, up the little valley with its straightened creek banks freshly dug out. A Komatsu crawler excavator sat there bright yellow, but quiet on a Sunday afternoon.

Rows of March corn stalks and furrows paralleled the ditch as the Honda climbed the other hillside. “What happened to contour farming, anyway?” she wondered. Not even a pair of narrow brome strips lining the creek bank had spared it from a big load of sediment. Mounds of Iowa loam now rested in regular formation along the bottomland. The high ground, meanwhile, showed its barley-colored clay foundation.

The 31 year-old field biologist turned elementary school teacher had been looking forward to meeting “young Farmer Murphy” again. Her friend and his neighbor, Ruthann Garcia, had offered that suggestion for the newest teacher at Ding Darling Elementary when they’d chatted last week in the Hy-Vee. “You should see his prairie remnant,” grinned Ruthann, who farmed a couple of miles west of the Murphy place. A real piece of prairie with a CRP wetland project sounded like a great place to take the kids when it got warmer.

Now on a bitter, gray prairie afternoon, Alex Murphy's second child, Rose, age eight, one of Laura’s favorite students, was waiting to greet her. (For a moment, Laura could see herself years ago in Sister Margaret’s sunny Franciscan classroom, rapt in listening to the story of teosinte, ancestor of corn -- King Corn in these parts.)

Yet, in spite of the child’s expectations, Laura was having second thoughts, nearly spoken aloud over the buzz of tires on crushed limestone. She knew Alex was single, and that the kids’ mother had died a couple of years ago of breast cancer. She wondered if she would be trespassing on ground recently turned… “He’s not that young, either,” she remembered from meeting Alex briefly during Rose’s parent-teacher conference last fall.

Too late now. Laura slowed for the second mailbox on the left at the top of the hill, and turned in without reading the name.

Whoa! A snarling black German shepherd exploded into view from behind the only granite boulder in the township. Some decorative landscaping! “What is this; am I lost?” she wondered. The place looked a little too fancy for an Irish immigrant Century Farm. Shiny grain bins and white board fences stood all around. Laura swung a one-eighty on the blacktop circle drive.

The shepherd, however, blocked her path, barking. Laura laid on the horn. The dog barked louder. She didn’t want to hit the beast. The Honda rolled forward. Tap-tap. Scarred knuckles on a gnarled hand in a brown leather sleeve tapped on her window. Laura stopped. A 70’s plus red face under a spotless pearl gray stockman’s hat and bushy brows looked her in the eye. She hit the window down button, and said brightly, “Hi, I think I’m lost. Nice dog!”

“You got that right, Missy! Ol’ Earl don’t care for greenies ‘round here. And, what’s that mean--that crap there on your back bumper?”

Laura stretched her spine and turned her head away for a moment, both from the rasping voice in her face and the stinking cigar and alcohol behind it. She needed a second to remember her the old Clean Water bumper sticker, “Keep your manure out of my aquifer!”

When the slobbery-mouthed farm dog began barking its bad breath through the window, Laura hit the gas with a “Just what it says. Bye!” and a wave. The bumper sticker flashed its message one more time.

“Hmmm. Kinda cranky!” She said aloud, as the mailbox proclaiming, “Harold Mundt -- Corn, Beans & Cattle” flashed by.

Laura twisted the audio knob and let her “Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?” CD ring a lot louder. The Tibetan mala prayer beads on her left wrist clicked to the beat. “Yep,” she thought, with a last look at the dust in the mirror, “compared to him, ‘young Farmer Murphy’ can’t be half bad.”

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Next week... "Dirty Beans," Chapter 2

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 1 was written and edited by John P. Gabbert

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.