Look for the Pattern

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 36

Look for the Pattern

At planting time, the varied patterns of squares and rectangles on the bare land across the Upper Midwestern corn belt tell the stories of its owners and landlords, its scientists and tenants, its farmers and bankers, its agency experts, its implement and seed sellers, the stories of all the people that make up an industry now called, "agribusiness." Some stories speak of careful stewardship with graceful grass waterways, and wide grassy headlands surrounding tilled ground, of carefully buffered creeks and ponds, of rotated grazing paddocks, stories about watershed projects, and tree and prairie plantings, even of restored wetlands where spring peepers sing.

Other hard-edged stories, more and more prevalent, tell of narrow-margined power farming, of racing wide equipment up slope and down, creating starter channels for approaching thunderstorms to work into gulleys that tumble topsoil, subsoil, and nutrients into streams and rivers below. These stories cut disc tracks to the very banks of sinous creeks or to already dead-straightened ditches that used to be creeks. They tighten ever-smaller nooses around the wet ground of vanishing wetlands and prairie potholes, wheeling circles with chisel plow, disc, and harrow. Where diverse strips of row crops once alternated with alfalfa and hay ground on the highest ridgeland, King Corn and Queen Soybean now reign alone, sloughing topsoil all around them into the valleys as if they could forever afford flowing robes of rich fabric, rare feathers, and prime furs.

Some stories define rows and rows of concentrated animal feeding operations, long low sheds full of chickens, turkeys, and swine surrounded by exhaust fans that exhale gases and fumes blowing downwind continously toward unfortunate neighbors. Small operators struggle to make ends meet with a non-union factory job in town and a hillside feedlot churned barren by a few feeder cattle. These number just few enough to slip under the minimum animal unit limit, but more than enough hooves the send tons of topsoil into the headerwater creeks below every time it rains. Downgrade of the big operations, waste lagoons collect slurried manure in increasingly large and unwelcome volumes. What used to smell like money to small farmers with a few sows, a chicken coop, and a few milkers now requires regulation, inspection, permits, law enforcement, and once in awhile, even judicial action and consequences.

Farming ain't what it used to be, thought Alexander Murphy as he studied the hillside six feet before him, sweeping his eyes right, then left, then back across the duff of the hardwood forest floor.

"Never mind for a minute. The pattern. Look for the pattern. Focus...focus..." he whispered.

He saw dead oak leaves and twigs. No. Downed ash leaves and bare soil, acorn and hickory hulls. Not that. Scraps of bark, decaying limbs rich with fungi, small pieces of limestone and sandstone. A delicate birdfoot violet in bloom, a rue anenome. No. Everywhere small green shoots of emerging flora breeched the forest floor, unrolling in green animation too slow for the eye to see, yet so rapidly that in two hours late on a sunny afternoon, the sweep of greenness would be noticeably more verdant to one looking up from intense seeking.

"The pattern. Just keep that pattern in your mind," Laura had said.

She had pried him off the tractor and away from the planter when the forecast showed clear sailing for at least three more days. Ruthann had the kids over for dinner on this Friday late afternoon so the two of them could spend a few hours together alone. Grandma Teresa was playing a few hands with her "Mighty Nineties" bridge club. Owen, meanwhile rested in front of the Cubs game on tv at home, holding his lymphoma at bay with a tight-lipped smile. "I'm fine," he lied. "Go on, git," he'd said.

Dry. It seemed too dry to Alexander. No mud on his boots today, even on this north slope not far above the river. He looked for her off to his left. Twenty yards away, Laura wielded a barkless, half-dollar thick oak limb before her as she stepped slowly uphill, looking just ahead of her feet. She, too, was studying the hillside, as if for some clue, for a glimmer of something a year missing, as if for something worthy of a prayer to Saint Anthony.

He watched her as she suddenly looked upgrade from the carpet of fiddlehead ferns. To Alexander, the ferns were almost singing at her feet. He knew he was in love with her, this beautiful dark-haired woman standing amid dutchmen's breeches and early may apples, surrounded by gooseberry bush, separated from him by just a few blackberry brambles.

She looked toward him smiling that smile, and pointing her walking stick upward to the lacy canopy of nearly bare limbs, a thin leafless lattice frosted with tiny buds and green catkins. A small cloud of dogwood blooms floated 40 feet above her, catching late sunlight, glowing like a shower of pale orange blossoms.

Alexander could see she was pointing at the top of a standing dead elm, a small second-growth tree already shedding bark from its trunk, tree-skin hanging in strips from the small vertical fountain of its remaining limbs. They climbed toward it.

(Once the glorious green archwork of towering joined limbs above streets and avenues in small towns and cities across the east and midwest, the American elm, the former fountain-like pillar of the woodlands, Alexander knew, subsisted now only as a remnant survivor. At this latitude they were destined to grow merely to young adulthood before dying of Dutch elm disease in a climate ever warm enough to support a northward-creeping plague.)

As their paths converged just below the base of the little elm, eight inches in diameter, Laura leaned into Alexander with her shoulder as if to push him off balance. Neither looked at the other, but rather intently, competitively, at the earth just before them.

They bent forward, staring hard, looking for that certain pattern -- that pale tan, sponge-like cone shape, the shy, wily pattern that could almost appear and disappear at will. They stared silently. A pileated woodpecker cackled in flight over the next ridge. The redbud bloomed nearby.

Then Laura straightened. She sighed with satisfaction, nudged Alexander with her elbow, and pointed with her stick to a place just 10 inches in front of his right boot.

"It popped up right in front you," Laura whispered as she stooped to look more closely.

"It did?" He whispered back. "Really? I just looked right there a second ago!" Alexander stepped back and squatted down, too, amazed.

Together they admired it, inhaled the unique mushroom aroma; together they welcomed -- that first morel.

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Next...Chapter 37

Thanks for these resources:

USDA, NRCS. 2002. The PLANTS Database, Version 3.5 (http://plants.usda.gov). National Plant Data Center, Baton Rouge, LA 70874-4490 USA.

USGS. 2003. Northern Prairie Biological Resources (http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/taxa_P.htm). Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, Jamestown, ND 58401 USA.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 36 was written and edited by John 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.