"Two Up, Two Down"—excerpt from OTHERS HAD IT WORSE

The first I can remember as a kid was living in this log cabin 4 rooms 2 up 2 down. The floors had holes in it. You could of throwed a cat through them. And upstairs where I slept with Barbara and Reva when it snowed on the bed we shook the snow off the covers when we got up. But luck was with us. We kids never seemed to be very sick.

Others Had It Worse: Sour Dock, Moonshine, and Hard Times in Davis County, Iowa, by Vetra Melrose Padget Covert and Chris D. Baker

"Roy Vaughn"—excerpt from OTHERS HAD IT WORSE

I remember I would go over to Roy Vaughn's and get baby Pidgeons to bring home and put them on top of the hen house in boxes and dig fish worms for them. Some I had to hold their mouths open while I would feed them but they were pets. I could holler for them and they would fly down on my Shoulder or head. Some drunk said he would give me a dollar for one. I took the dollar but before I caught the bird I give the dollar back. I could not sell my Pidgeon.

Others Had It Worse: Sour Dock, Moonshine, and Hard Times in Davis County, Iowa, by Vetra Melrose Padget Covert and Chris D. Baker

Excerpt from THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS, by Douglas Bauer

In The Book of Famous Iowans, Douglas Bauer explores the life of Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembering the month of June 1957 in his hometown,  the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the "resplendently sequined" Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.

--

I learned about my mother's search for work not from her or my father, but from my grandmother one evening as the two of us sat in her upstairs kitchen. I remember that the heat in her apartment that night was a stunning, sodden thing. I remember we had, my grandmother and I, tried and failed to eat our supper, so she'd made us ice cream floats to fill our stomachs.

Before she told me my mother's secret, she'd recalled my parents' arriving from Cheyenne and how, with a determined buoyancy, she and my mother had spent several days complimenting and deferring to one another while at the same time each was taking the other's measure. She said, "The first thing you noticed, of course, was her looks. I said to your father, 'How did you manage this? You're a handsome boy, honey, but the two of you together, it looks like the princess hasn't got around to kissing the frog!'"

But, she said, while my mother's beauty was something to admire, what there was to like was her intelligence; that she was smart enough to know she should be scared to death and strong enough to do all she could to hide her fear. Still, my grandmother said, when she looked back, she wished my mother had been able to say she was frightened; perhaps then she wouldn't have felt "she had to have her dukes up all the time."

Excerpt from THE BOOK OF FAMOUS IOWANS, by Douglas Bauer

In The Book of Famous Iowans, Douglas Bauer explores the life of Will Vaughn, a man of late middle age living in Chicago with his second wife, remembering the month of June 1957 in his hometown,  the rural village of New Holland, Iowa. More precisely, Will remembers just a few days of that month and the quick sequence of astonishing events that have colored, ever since, the logic of his heart and the moods of his mind. He tells of his stunningly beautiful young mother, Leanne, who liked to recall the years of the Second World War, during which she sang with a dance band in a lounge in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He tells too of his father, Lewis, a soldier in the war who one night saw the "resplendently sequined" Leanne step onstage and began at that instant to plot his courtship of her.

--

I have kept three photographs of my mother, Leanne McQueen Vaughn, and anybody who sees one of them invariably asks me who the beautiful young woman in the picture is. No one recognizes a trace of her in me, since I grew, against her certain prediction, to resemble my father. I have his fair coloring; his stocky build; his wide, square face.

It would be easy to think that the photos had been taken, not over a decade, but within a span of a few weeks. For her face in the first, when she was fifteen, appears remarkably the same as in the last, that of a woman whose sophisticated beauty has matured just moments before the picture was snapped. Her expression, too, is closely repeated and seems to me one of cool epiphany. It's conveyed by a watchful gleam in her eyes and in the way she holds her head, gracefully extending her neck so that she looks to be peering out over the heads of the crowd. I know well how it felt to be within its range (and it often felt powerfully confidential and secure). But thinking now of her actions, the choices she made, and how they permanently changed us all, I see her expression as suggesting that she has raised her eyes to look past the distractions of hope and innocence, in order to see what she needed to see.

Excerpt from ROWS OF MEMORY: JOURNEYS OF A MIGRANT SUGAR-BEET WORKER, by Saúl Sánchez

Every year from April to October, the Sánchez family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951, Saúl Sánchez began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.

--

The Mexicans that the sugar-beet companies recruited back then to work in the sugar-beet fields did not receive the same treatment that was given to the Russian Germans brought from Europe. The companies did not lend them money to buy land; they did not offer them any equipment, seed, or utensils to help them work the land bought with borrowed money…. In place of loans, they received credit in company stores to obtain their foodstuffs while they completed the harvest. And they were not paid until they finished…. They did not live in town either; there were separate labor camps for them to keep them apart from the white population. The only tools the companies allowed them, which were also purchased on credit from those same well-stocked stores, were the ones perfected earlier by the Japanese: the short-handled hoe.

For a person to be stooped or arched over (“stooped steep” as people would say with a touch of ironic humor) while hoeing with a hoe that has a ten- or twelve-inch handle for as long as eight, ten, or even twelve hours a day is how I would define the word torture…. It was a punishing way to make a living.

Excerpt from ROWS OF MEMORY: JOURNEYS OF A MIGRANT SUGAR-BEET WORKER, by Saúl Sánchez

Every year from April to October, the Sánchez family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951, Saúl Sánchez began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.

--

When I was young I used to hear members of my family say that our ancestors had come to the Winter Garden Valley of Texas at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that they came from the same area: the border between Mexico and the United States. What I have been able to ascertain is that they arrived during the time of the Mexican Revolution in the case of our maternal grandfather and a little after that in the case of our paternal grandparents….

[O]ur grandparents didn’t just decide one day to abandon the cotton fields in Texas to go up north and do sugar beets. It was an incremental transition. Their method of decision making was logical for those times. People acted as members of a family rather than as individuals. And they were traditional families, they were bound by powerful family ties. The decisions made by the elders, especially the older brothers, directly influenced the lives of all the members of the extended family.

Excerpt from ROWS OF MEMORY: JOURNEYS OF A MIGRANT SUGAR-BEET WORKER, by Saúl Sánchez

Every year from April to October, the Sánchez family traveled—crowded in the back of trucks, camping in converted barns, tending and harvesting crops across the breadth of the United States. In 1951, Saúl Sánchez began to contribute to his family’s survival by helping to weed onions in Wind Lake, Wisconsin. He was eight years old. In this excerpt from Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker, Sánchez invites us to appreciate the largely unrecognized and poorly rewarded strength and skill of the laborers who harvest the fruits and vegetables we eat.

--

I write this memoir to leave behind some testimony of a way of life that has disappeared perhaps forever. It is a personal narrative based on experience, taken from memory, and written years after the episodes it narrates. These episodes may not seem exalted or seem like exceptional accomplishments to the reader, but they are to the author. They are exalted because the people who appear here sacrificed a great part of their lives, and in some cases all of their lives, for the benefit of their families. And they are exceptional because it is the narrative of a people who not only survived for years under shocking living conditions but also because of those individuals who appear in these pages managed to triumph in their lives. If we also add the fact that these people spoke Spanish and not English, it is not difficult to understand why they embody those exalted and exceptional qualities that one finds in epics.

Excerpt from INDIA'S ORGANIC FARMING REVOLUTION, by Sapna E. Thottathil

India's Organic Farming Revolution, by Sapna E. Thottathil, rethinks the politics of organic food by focusing on what it means for the people who grow and sell it—what it means for their health, the health of their environment, and also their economic and political well-being. Taking readers to the state of Kerala in southern India, she shows us a place where the so-called "Green Revolution" program of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and rising pesticide use had failed to reduce hunger while it caused a cascade of economic, medical, and environmental problems.

--

In the south of India is a land of coconuts—Kerala, as it is called in Malayalam, the local language. Several sizes and varieties of coconut trees fill every possible corner, swaying behind train stations in groves and along city streets, lining the sides of every canal and waterway, and ranging from the Malabar Coast to high into the foggy mountain ranges of the Western Ghats. When you look down from rooftops or out of the window of an airplane, everything is green—a verdant landscape extending to the horizon.

Kerala has enchanted travelers for centuries with its natural resources and geography. Marco Polo sought its spices, and colonial empires fought for control of its teak forests and medicinal plants. Today, the southwestern state is the "torchbearer" of the Government of India's Incredible India, a marketing campaign designed by the Indian Ministry of Tourism. Images of Kerala's greenery, from its rolling hills of spice gardens to its coasts lined with coconut palms, dominate promotional posters and videos for India.

"Don't be fooled," warned Sugathakumari, an environmental activist born and raised in Kerala. "You can't even drink our coconut water without getting sick." She did not see a mythical landscape of spices and coconut palms. Instead, when she looked at the state's landscape, she saw crops of pineapples, rubber, and other cash crops, all regularly sprayed with the pesticides furadan and endosulfan, two poisonous chemicals leaching into the watersheds. Promotional images of the state for travel and tourism belied how its greenery was produced.

It was the year 2010. The Kerala Forest Research Institute had just released a study documenting that the fingernails of pineapple pickers in Kerala were falling off after they had been exposed to an unknown cocktail of chemical pesticides. This was not an unusual story, Sugathakumari emphasized to an audience gathered for the 2010 Indian Biodiversity Conference in the capital of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram. She reminded the crowd that, earlier in that same decade, several children in a northern agricultural district of the state had been born with severe physical deformities after their parents had been exposed to endosulfan, a harmful chemical classified as a persistent organic pollutant by the scientific community because of its ability to linger in the environment for years. For over a quarter of a century, these agrarian communities had been repeatedly sprayed aerially with the chemical to control pests on nearby cashew plantations. Kerala had become a toxic place: its lush greenery was now drenched in poisonous pesticides, bad for human health and the environment.

Excerpt from LEAVING THE PINK HOUSE, by Ladette Randolph

Leaving the Pink House, by Ladette Randolph, describes how, on September 12, 2001, Randolph and her husband bought a dilapidated farmhouse on twenty acres outside Lincoln, Nebraska, and set about gutting and rebuilding the house themselves. They had nine months to complete the work. The project, undertaken at a time of national unrest and uncertainty, led Randolph to reflect on the houses of her past and the stages of her life that played out in each, both painful and joyful.

--

We weren't hopeful that day in September as we headed south of Lincoln, Nebraska, on Highway 77 to look at what the ad had said was a "farmhouse on twenty acres fifteen miles from Lincoln." We couldn't help but notice as we drove, though, that instead of the usual suburban muck, the highway was lined by rolling hills, trees, well-tended farmsteads, and lovely vistas spreading out before us at the crest of each new hill.

I'd been doing this periodically—going to look at acreages—for the sake of my husband Noel. When he'd moved to Nebraska from San Francisco eleven years earlier, he'd fallen in love with the countryside in southeastern Nebraska, but he'd never particularly liked Lincoln. He preferred to live in either a large city or in the country. Not surprisingly, his dream since I'd met him had been to live in a house in the country. But at the time we married I'd protested I wasn't going to put my grade-school children on a bus to attend a consolidated school. No matter what Noel felt about Lincoln, its public schools were among the most progressive in the state.

Despite this, in recent months I'd been humoring Noel with these occasional forays into the countryside. Indeed, my argument about the children's education was growing obsolete as the elder two had already left home for college and the youngest was a junior at Lincoln High School. This was clearly something Noel wanted, and I, at times begrudgingly, admitted to myself it was his turn.

We'd seen property after property in various states of disrepair, or worse, old houses remodeled in "country" decor. Like many midwestern cities, Lincoln was developing irresponsibly, and almost every direction out of the city was lined with miles of development acreages, tract malls, and other evidence of sprawl. Our aversion to the unappealing drives and the inevitably disappointing properties on the other end had finally led Noel himself to conclude that owning a country house near Lincoln was probably impossible.

Excerpt from DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, by Joshua Doležal

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, by Joshua Doležal, is a coming-of-age memoir about moving from the mountains of northwestern Montana to the Midwest.


There are a few rules for harvesting trash, as I have explained to my team of volunteers: Plastics such as drinking bottles and milk jugs should be drained and separated for recycling, so long as they are not filled with sludge or slime. Anything like a propane or an aerosol can with a hose attached, a bluish valve, or milky residue should be left untouched and reported to the local police as possible methamphetamine gear. If the recyclables and trash can be bagged in different colors, so much the better.

Each castaway item has a story: a flip-flop with a pregnancy kit, a yellow Pennzoil bottle, a foam smiley face from a boat antenna. Tires and propane tanks pile up by the dozens. Sometimes a refrigerator finds its way downstream. Where does it all come from? What is the story? After years of practicing the wilderness ethic of invisibility, I struggle to decipher this new text scribbled over the shoreline. It is too easy to dismiss expansion, a larger view. "The eye is the first circle," Emerson writes; "the horizon which it forms is the second." As I walk the shoreline, searching  (almost hoping) for trash, I begin to think of all of the individual choices made, why someone might choose Arrowhead water over Fiji, and why, after buying clean water--after making that conscious choice--one would toss the bottle into the lake. Soda bottles tell a clearer tale, but nearly half the recyclable detritus in Iowa waterways once held commercial drinking water. How can this be?

Excerpt from NECESSARY COURAGE, by Lowell J. Soike

In Necessary Courage, historian Lowell J. Soike tells the often forgotten or overlooked stories of Iowans who helped African Americans escaping from slavery in Missouri and points further south. By serving as conductors along the underground railroad, these people risked their lives and livelihoods to ensure that others could live free. 
       Here’s one of these stories, featuring antislavery activists John and Isabel Armstrong, who settled in southern Appanoose County in the 1850s.

Two runaways, John and Archie, quickly encountered difficulties as their escape from central Missouri proved easier to plan than to accomplish. As they struck north toward the Iowa state line, they had to move more slowly than they had expected because John suffered from muscle and joint pains. Archie stayed with his friend even as the trip they thought would take only a few days stretched into three weeks. Finally they entered the woods near the Armstrongs’ house. While John rested, Archie went and knocked on the door in hopes of finding help. His timing could not have been worse.

           Isabel Armstrong…opened the door to see a black man in need, but at that very moment a neighbor unfriendly to the underground railroad sat in the next room. She quietly hurried Archie into the bedroom, where he waited until the visitor left. The relieved Armstrongs then gave him some food to eat and learned from him that his suffering companion lay in the nearby woods. John Armstrong had a reliable neighbor take the fugitive John some food while arranging for the two runaways to be taken that evening to the farm of John Shepherd, Isabel’s brother…. Rested for the night, the two traveled with Shepherd to their next stop at Drakesville.

Excerpt from DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINTOP, by Joshua Doležal

Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging, by Joshua Doležal, is a coming-of-age memoir about moving from the mountains of northwestern Montana to the Midwest.


Lonna motioned for us to sit. Jones and Tozzi took the open chairs as Jacobson and I leaned against the doorjamb.

"How'd you like to go to northern Alberta?" she grinned. "I just got the call, and we're trying to put together a crew. Libby will send a squad, we'll get one each from Eureka, Rexford, and the Cabinet district, and I thought we could send you four. Jones, you'll be our squad boss. They'll be sending Claude Shanley from the Cabinet to run the crew."

Jones sniffed. "What the hell do they want us in Alberta for?"

"Big muskeg fires, they say. It's a ground moss, grows up to five feet deep. Anytime those swampy areas dry out a little bit, like down in the Everglades, you get some bad fires. Once the heat starts skunking around in that moss, it's almost impossible to stop. Anyway, you guys interested?"

"Hell, yes," Tozzi said. We all agreed. Nobody ever turned down an off-forest assignment. With twenty-one straight days on the clock, twelve to fourteen hours a day, the overtime was reason enough. We were all cash-craving college kids except for Jacobson, one of the Troy boys still determined to make a life for himself in our hometown. Jones and Tozzi stood to go, but Lonna waved them back.

"There's something I want you all to know, just to be on the safe side. Claude is a nice guy, but he's not all there. Just two years ago he was crew boss with a hotshot outfit, and one of his guys died on the fire line--tree-felling accident or something. Whatever it was, it got Claude demoted. If it was me, I'd never send him out again, but it's not my call." Lonna leaned forward in her chair. "You guys don't hesitate to call home if you think things aren't safe up there, OK? No heroics. I need you to pay attention and speak up if your gut tells you to. All right?"

She looked at Jones to be sure. He nodded and pulled his cap down over his eyes.

Excerpt: THE TALLGRASS PRAIRIE READER, edited by John T. Price

To celebrate the flowers of July, an excerpt from The Tallgrass Prairie Reader, edited by John T. Price.

The sun is high and hot. A single yellow jewelweed blossom, large and pale yellow, not orange like the jewelweeds in the pasture and the draws, dangles above the stream. A hummingbird zooms and sizzles through the flowers. The propeller wash of his wings shakes the whole plant from stem to stern. Mulleins along the stream have reached their peak. Spires plastered with pale-yellow blossoms, pale-green and hairy leaves flopped out. Gold coral fungus grows out of old stumps. One could go about gathering an enormous yellow bouquet out of the heart of July. Fill the arms with orange lilies, the ubiquitous gold; sweep up the sunflowers, the gold honeysuckle, the great stalky suns of compass plants and prairie dock; find clumps of black-eyed Susans rimmed with gold, and wild coreopsis, ragwort and squaw weed through the high, dry woods, yellow hearts of daises and bedstraw in the fields.

Gold bugs, yellow butterflies, orange lilies. What to do with this great fragrant glow? Well, hold on to it. You’ll want it in the days to come.

--Josephine W. Johnson, The Inland Island (1969)