Archive for July 6th, 2009

After driving almost 1000 miles, we’re traveling down Highway 14 toward my family’s ancestral home in Mankato, Minnesota. After two days in the car, including one night camping out in the bluestem prairie of Kansas, we’re anxious to reach our destination, where we will spend the week. The terrain here is just as I rememeber it from when I came out to visit my grandparents here as a child – green swards of soybeans and corn, cut by long thin groves of trees running along a slough or bordering a pond or lake. The sky is filled with puffy clouds, as evening comes, and the air is a moderate 80 degrees.

I haven’t been here for years – six to be exact – and if it was’nt for our annual camping trip with my dad, I might have put it off for longer. But maybe I wouldn’t have, either. The children are now at an age when they can begin to appreciate the depth of the family history here. My father’s family has lived here since they immigrated about the time of the Civil War; and the grandparents that lived here were my closest extended family members in childhood.

What held the ancestors in southern Minnesota all these years, I wonder, when other families have wandered hither and yon? And how did I and my children somehow fall out of the loop to be born elsewhere? Is there something in Minnesota that makes them want to stay, or are they the type of people who would have stayed anywhere?

This is agricultural country, I reflect as I look outside the window. One who lived here would have the comfort of knowing that if food transit methods broke down, they would probably still have plenty to eat from local farms. Fall livestock can be seen in the fields as we approach Mankato along a two-lane highway bordered by old-fashioned telegraph poles. The road meanders, it, like my family, has been here a long time. During this week, I will try to figure out what it was about this country that keeps people generation after generation.

Well, I did it: I wrangled my way into a job on the ancestral farm in Davis, CA. I’ve been staying in the house my grandfather built, and the sense of continuity is impressive. It’s amazing to think the same family has lived here for over 50 years. Hopefully, this little ten acre parcel never leaves their hands.

Bordered by Putah Creek, Highway 95, a neighbor, and a gravel road, it sits about five miles outside the college town of Davis – newly emptied by the end of the school year. Every day, piles of bicyclists in bright cycling gear go by on the highway – a narrow two lane affair, which sharply turns and goes across the bridge over the creek right by the property. This bridge is an art form, decorated with decades of graffiti. Nearly two thirds of the land here is taken up by Christmas trees – firs, cedar, and even a few evil sequoias, which sport very spiny needles and are not pruner-friendly.

Fruit trees dot the area, too, and a small barn houses chickens and two highly obese donkeys, who are moved about the place every day to “keep weeds down.” About seven cats make their home here, mostly barn cats.

My sister and I are here mainly to prune those acres of trees. Every morning we go out with a wheelbarrow filled with two pruning shears, a pair of hedge shears, two handsaws, a pump-bottle of weed killer, and a metal bucket with a jar of stump killer and a brush to kill volunteer trees- and, starting today, a battery operated radio, which hummed hits from the 70s and 80s as we worked. We make out way down two rows at a time, cutting off extraneous branches and double tops.

About once a week we rent a chipper, and, hauling it on a tractor, go through oue work and chip the large piles of branches. We work from sometime after 7 to sometime after noon. At our 10 am and noon breaks we come in, drink some water, and usually sit and read the newspaper or play video games. In the afternoon, we rest; I study Biology and S stuffs creatures or reads papers or somesuch. We eat at 5, and around 7 go out and move about 600 feet of metal pipes down the rows, to set up the night’s sprinklers. Every day we move about five rows. Then we come inside, mess about more – lately, I watch her play Zelda – and then have some ice cream with fruit before retiring around 9.

It’s not bad, and at the end of the summer, hopefully I will have a car. Meanwhile, I heartily enjoy the time with my sister, whom I have not seen this much since she was in highschool.