Borderlines: Sketches From the Empty Quarter: Names With Wings

Longron. O’day. Downing. Babcock. Swenjen. Hill. Kaiser. Bowlin. Andrews. Henning. Dixon. Hadfield. Ahlgrim. Lane. Sicklebower. Lawson. Johnson. Budde. Taylor. Evans. Crozier.

And so many more...

Although it can be helpful, it is not entirely necessary to be a farmer or rancher to connect the melody of nearly disremembered names to specific places in the landscape. But it’s highly likely that if you do so, you might have deep rural roots. These are the lingering remnants of ¹⁹th and ²⁰th century caretakers whose surnames remain in memory like ghostly silhouettes, visible only when throwing out less-than-original lines such as “back when I was young“ to a captive audience. (IE, that kid in the passenger seat.) The physical structures marking them are now weathered frame homes, crumbling “soddies,” dugouts, scattered clumps of stone and fading corrals of cedar and lodgepole pine that remain attached to their rapidly departing identities, yet somehow still decorate modern fields, although usually seen now only as obstacles to efficient cultivation of the land.

Those old names are a living history that will drift away into a long forgotten past when we few who can still match faces to places depart this realm. To most of the current custodians (my tribe included) they are simply a means of identification, easier to remember than the complex litany of quarters, sections, townships, and ranges.

They only hear a name. I see weathered faces that I knew well. And I watch in my mind’s eye as calloused hands work impossibly hard with selfless dedication, using only simple, nearly worn out equipment and wearing ragged, patched clothing. I smell hand-rolled cigarettes, ancient leather, freshly plowed earth, and honest sweat. I hear the stories of “the way it was back then” in accents brought here with them and covering all the cardinal directions from whence they came. I share a drink of gyp water from a burlap wrapped crockery jug, a leftover breakfast biscuit, some sun-dried fruit, and a bit of chew. I hear the popping refrain of two-cylinder tractors with straight exhaust stacks, the distant crossing songs of long vanished Missouri-Pacific trains, and the groaning of overloaded single axle grain trucks as they labor down rutted trail roads. I recall their stories of the perfection of starlit nights before the coming of the REA, wild stampedes in an unfenced prairie and the terrible times of the Great Depression. I see gingham dresses, dusty scarves, railroad caps, sheepskin coats that flew in worn torn skies over Europe, bib overalls, stained straw cowboy hats and “suntan” trousers.

But clearest of all I see the determination in their eyes and the set of their jaw as they lament too many seasons of lost crops or calves and the beckoning promise of “next year.”

I will remember them... until I don’t.

Hopefully, someday, someone further down the line will recall “the old Harkness Place” and match faces to that memory.