KATHLEEN MELIN
Seeking a New Land
On December 25th, I returned home at 10 p.m. and heard the alto call of a Great Horned owl beside the Swedish immigrant barn. I hadn’t heard one that close before.
A round moon reflected on the crust of snow, making dusk of night. Another owl called from my woods to the east and yet another nearby to the northwest.
Silent night, no traffic on the back road or from the distant highway; no low persistent drone from the farmer’s industrial corn dryer; not enough snow for the ratcheting high whine of snowmobiles.
I stood in the still cold, enchanted by the owl cantata. Their calls continued calm and bright, but my joy fell to grief.
Last April, the rumble of heavy equipment and crack of wood like breaking bones shrieked in the valley north of my farmstead. The farmer across my fence line was demolishing twenty acres of woods.
When I saw the early stage of destruction, I nearly cried. Stout branches ripped from trees over a century-old straggled on the ground. Tall pyres of stumps shoved together by a bulldozer stood ready for burning. Intricate roots torn from the ground still reached for each other. On one side, a wall of enormous dismembering equipment stood ready for the next day’s damage.
In May, the farmer stopped cutting. He bulldozed the pocked land and planted. By fall, the few remaining patches of twisted trees stuck up amidst a tawny wheat crop.
In my childhood, I’d wandered the farmer’s woods and found a stone foundation. I imagined kitchen, comfort, and companionable living in that small square. When I asked my mother about it, she recalled a Scottish family with eight children and a meager life. In the rubble of their poor home, lilacs spread in a woven thicket an acre or more in size. Branches closed overhead, the top laden with drooping blossoms, each flower big as a bouquet, with the light fragrance of spring.
Lilacs arrived with early immigrants, another in the long list of non-native species, vigorous as the immigrants themselves, like my ancestors, and now, me.
Swedish peasants left their homes by the thousands in the late 1800s. The quiet violence of a top-heavy political, religious, and economic structure bled them for the king, the church, and the upper-class elite. When famine spread across the country, my great-grandfather stripped the inner bark from trees and pounded it to flour. He left in the flood of Swedish emigration, and so did my great-grandmother.
They met here and settled on this square forty acres purchased from a Civil War veteran who’d received it as payment for soldiering. Before that, the government claimed it during the era of Indian Removal through a corrupt treaty with the Anishinabe, called Chippewa by Europeans.
A trail established long before settlers crosses the forty diagonally as it meanders from Clam Falls to the Saint Croix River.
In my grandmother’s childhood, she feared native people who camped in the woods and traversed the trail. In 1911, when she was fourteen years old and newly motherless, she barred the door and hid in the knee-hole of the desk with her six-year-old sister while a remnant band looked in the windows and roamed the farm. They were hungry, starvation another calamity of unfulfilled treaties, and took some chickens when they left. One of the neighbors grew extra potatoes, ready in burlap sacks, to give them.
A hard cold followed that first harvest, and the ragged cut trees had a reprieve. In early December destruction resumed, and then the trees were gone.
All through the winter, the owls sparred in my island of woods, their calls a trebling forceful pitch. They sounded earlier in the evening, too, and by night, lapped one another like people over-talking in a championship of ego and dominance.
The following spring, when I heard a skid steer in the valley working the fence line, I ambled down. The farmer puttered over to me and cut the engine. He tapped a cigarette from a hardpack and lit it with hands swollen like a baseball mitt.
He nodded once toward the field.
“Big waste of time,” he said. “Prices so low I got nothing for that crop.”
“Looks like lots of nice firewood,” I said.
“Those trees were so twisted it wasn’t worth the trouble to split them.”
He grumbled on about commodity traders living in the big city and setting prices for farmers, clueless big-headed politicians, and a system that does and doesn’t support cash crop farming.
I knew nothing about the culture of commodity traders. I’d heard farmers complain about the system. But one of the big farmers told me: “We milk the cows and we milk the government.”
My hope in meeting him at the fence line had been to make a small connection and glean some understanding of why he’d destroyed the woods, though it wouldn’t make a difference at this point. But I couldn’t inquire in a way that might have been helpful and he couldn’t offer.
I made a slight turn toward leaving. He continued, telling me about a health issue in his family, trips to the doctor, and drugs that cost a thousand dollars.
The enormous compounding problems are so big and so far beyond me. Still, I felt anger: at the farmer’s dire decisions, the commodity traders’ unconscious price setting, inept and ego-driven political maneuvering. I wanted to blame: deceptive treaty negotiations, the self-servitude of the Swedish elite, the ignorant innocence of my peasant ancestors. All completely useless, but human, so human.
Owls are fiercely territorial. In winter when they prepare for breeding season, they stay within a quarter-mile of their nests. But their nests were gone, their territories eradicated, the trees and their concentric memories sacrificed to a terrible god.
I didn’t know if the owls would or could find a home in my complicated paradise. But the least I could do was welcome them and listen. I could listen and amplify my compassion beyond them to all of us.
Kathleen Melin is the author of By Heart, a memoir of progressive education (Clover Valley Press 2008). Her creative and journalistic work has appeared in national and international publications including The Baltimore Review, EssayDaily, and Eric Utne’s Cosmo DooGoods Urban Almanac. She holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota.