Prior to the 1929 stock market crash. my dad was a successful stockbroker in Houston. As a result of the crash. he and my mother lost their house and all their other possessions. My father chose to stay in Houston. My mother and I sought refuge on my grandparents’ farm, not far from Red Cloud, Nebraska. Today I think of the farm often. It draws me. I have a sense of belonging there.
My cousin Mary Lea and I are the only persons on earth today who remember that part of Webster County. I am the only person who truly remembers the farm, because Mary Lea lived a half mile down the road and rarely visited. The farm house had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. In this respect it was like the other farm houses in the area and like the one-room country school I attended. While I lived there, I was quite unconscious of the primitive nature of our existence. It was the norm for everyone we knew except for my aunts, uncles and cousins who lived in the city and would come to visit from time to time.
Throughout the drought and depression years of 1930-1936, terrible for the grownups, I roamed the woods, slid down straw stacks, smelled the odors of the barn, and rode old Prince out to the corn field as he drew the wagon. I bathed in wash tubs and used the outdoor privy, or an outdoor chamber pot, like everyone else in that farm country. I read and studied by the light of kerosene lamps. At Christmas our tree was lit by real candles (for a few seconds, just long enough for everyone to see the lovely sight, then quickly extinguished).
The north-south road that divided the farm was important. Often I trudged out to the road to climb the cottonwood tree on the other side of it. Safely sheathed on my belt for this adventure was the one-dollar hunting knife I had bought by mail order. Once a day I would trudge out to the the mailbox on the road. In the morning, during the school year, I would go out to the road to begin a one-mile walk to school (go ahead, roll your eyes if you want to, but it’s true). Actually, during three of the six years during which I attended Pleasant Hill School, I would get a ride from the teacher as she passed the farm on the way to school. The school is gone now, but its location is marked by the cemetery across the road from where it once stood.
By 1936, my father and mother had saved enough money to be able to make a fresh start together in Houston. In 1938, my grandmother Boner died and my grandfather came to live with us in Houston. He died in 1941 and is buried outside of Kirwin, Kansas, next to my grandmother. Their four children inherited the farm. They sold it and divided the proceeds among them. Later the State of Nebraska bought the farm. It is now the Elm Creek Wildlife Refuge. .
I have since lived in Texas, Nebraska. Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey. Once in a while, as I reflect on the places where I used to live, I have no desire to revisit them beyond the usual curiosity we all feel about such places– with one great exception: something inside draws me, and has always tugged at me, to revisit the site of my grandparents’ farm. Between 1936 and 2009, I was able to do so only three times, with only a few hours available on each occasion. Then in 2009, after long planning, my son and I were able to spend two full days exploring the site. Every structure that once stood there is gone: the house, the barn, the privy, the chicken coop, the windmill, and the fences. The area is almost completely overgrown with tough, twisted little trees, thick brush and weeds. We discovered no artifacts. Deer, turkeys, racoons and red-winged blackbirds live there now.
The chief link to the past, little changed from when I departed in 1936, is Elm Creek. Rising from a spring north of the farm site, it flows diagonally from west to east across the property, plunges under the railroad track and then turns southward toward the Republican River, forming the southeastern border of the property my grandparents once owned. While I lived there, I never heard that stream referred to as “Elm Creek.” It was just “the creek.”
Elm Creek flows today as it did throughout all the drought years. I have come to realize in recent years how the creek sustained my grandparents, my mother and me. We lived an almost normal life while farmers who lived on unwatered land were one by one forced to abandon their farms. Elm Creek was the source of ground water for the pump on the back porch of the farm house. It was where my mother used to take me wading. Along the way I watched the swift current tug at the watercress. Each wading expedition ended where the creek dived under the raillroad trestle. I would climb the embankment beside the trestle to the track above (it seemed a lot higher in those days than it does now). My grandfather grew alfalfa and corn in the fields near the creek, and he always planted a big vegetable garden near its banks. Mary Lea used to play at a spot farther south along the stream, where it is bridged by a road. She called it a “crick” then and calls it a “crick” today.
Today Elm Creek is a source of reassurance for me. Its being there today suggests that the farm house, the barn, the windmill, the chicken coop and the privy were really there once, as I remember them. Of course the railroad track is there today as it was in the 1930s, but it has been since renewed several times. The creek is the same.
As I said at the beginning of this reminiscence, I am quietly drawn to that patch of earth and to the creek flowing through it. Do I wish to go back there and build a retirement home near by? By no means! I am indeed retired. We live in Dallas and do not wish to leave our friends. Even if I had a fortune, I would not build a second home near Elm Creek. The land has no need of me. The crops in the surrounding fields look healthy, more so than they used to in the long-ago era of small farms and horse power. No, I will never physically go back. I am content to haunt the place, a ghost standing on the trestle, listening to the creek burble beneath. I feel frustrated, though, whenever a fisherman wades by. I want very much to tell him this story, but he cannot hear me, even if I shout.