Synaptic

“Vandalia” wrestles thoughtfully with the author’s sense of place, especially with the question of how to bear witness to loss but also face the future with realistic optimism. The essay also situates place in the contexts of social and natural history.

-Joshua Dolezal

---

Southeast Iowa, Fall 2010

“Please, Papa, buy the treatment. Please.”

Dad scratches his nose then stuffs his hand inside the pocket of his overalls. “I’ll run by Earl May next time I’m in town.”

I look out the west windows towards our two towering oak trees, older than me. Older than my dad. Older than our house, which was built before people listened to the radio or tractors had rubber tires.

“Thank you. They’re worth it.”

He rubs the back of his neck, tired of my nagging. I understand; the chemical is expensive, and I’m not the one paying for it. Still…

* * *

Southeast Iowa, Summer 2010

I hop off my bicycle onto Competine Road and knock down the kickstand. I’m about five miles to the east of my house – three and a half as the crow flies – and straddling the dotted line in the middle of the highway. I’m not concerned about getting hit. The vehicles that come down Competine are big enough for me to hear from a mile off and are mostly seen during harvest time.

It’s the beginning of June so the crops are only shin high. In another month and a half, these country roads will be nothing more than pathways weaving through an impenetrable maze of corn.

Today, though… Today I can see forever. I’m stopped at this spot because it’s the highest point around. Every which way I turn, the fields stretch from one horizon to the next, dividing my world in two: blue on top, green on bottom, me standing where the two kiss. The wind is blowing just right – a caress from the west – and carries the perfume of freshly turned dirt and new life. I inhale deep, greedy gulps. It is as Ted Kooser writes in Local Wonders, “The unique combination of a number of fragrances into one indefinable evocative scent that punches its fist straight to the heart” (123). This place even has a taste to it thanks to the ubiquitous dust: a dry, chalky texture with a thick aftertaste intermingled with my salty sweat from the long bike ride. From here, I can watch as the bean plants sway to the side in silver ribbons, rippling like waves across a dark sea. Our own ocean right in the middle of Southeast Iowa.

There is another reason I like this place. When I look to the west, despite the miles, I can pick out our house. It stands atop a hill, too, though that’s not what makes it visible from this distance. It’s the two pine oaks. They soar over all the other trees and buildings in about a fifteen mile radius. It doesn’t matter which way I come home – north, east, south, or west – those trees are the first thing I spot. Two giants standing sentinel in our backyard. I know I will never be lost so long as they are there, working like beacons, pointing me homeward.

Except that’s all in jeopardy now. Our trees have an infestation. The district forester stopped by and after his inspection informed us, “The galls won’t kill the trees, but you might want to take care of it just in case.”

The just in case argument is a hard sell for my father. The chemical that kills the larvae inside the galls costs $80 a quart. And our trees are so big we’ll need four quarts. Each. That’s $640 total for the treatment, and it’ll take more than one application to get rid of them.

I’m pushing hard, though. Those trees aren’t just trees to me. I’ve lived in the same house my entire life and the oaks are a part of my home. I’ve spread my blanket beneath their boughs and leaned against their rough bark, reading novels and swiping off the occasional ant that strayed across my legs, no doubt mistaking them for roots. The tree furthest to the east hosted my five year old birthday party’s pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. The one to the west had shelf fungi so large I used to try to climb them when I was younger. We even had one of those clichéd tire swings hanging from the branches of the eastern one, a branch so high up Dad had to borrow my uncle’s cherry picker to hang it. That’s what I’m losing if those trees die: memories. I linger in the road a moment longer, trying to cement in my mind what the oaks look like from here. I want to be able to picture them clearly in the future, not only because this is the summer after my senior year of high school and I’ll no longer be living at home come fall, but also in case there’s ever a day I stand where I am now and have no trees to direct me home. I worry that day might come sooner than I had hoped. Because, even from this distance, I can see the stark outline of their bare branches. The oaks didn’t bud this year.

* * *

Ohio, Spring 2009

It’s my junior year of high school, and we’re driving back from Pennsylvania, my mom, dad, and I, after watching my brother compete at Nationals for track. I’m reading Gone with the Wind to pass the time and just finished. I shut the heavy novel, lean my head back, and close my eyes, the last passage reverberating in my mind: “I’ll think of it tomorrow, at Tara” (1448). Tomorrow, at Tara… at Tara.

“Mom, Dad? I think we should name our home.”

I catch my mom’s eyes in the rearview mirror. My dad is in the passenger seat but doesn’t turn around. I can see his belly – too many Mt. Dews – move steadily up and down. He’s probably asleep.

“What’s that, Bug?” Mom asks, directing her attention back to the road.

“I said, ‘I think we should name our home.’ You know, like Scarlett O’Hara and Tara.”

Mom laughs and then falls silent. I consider the subject dismissed, but she surprises me by speaking up a few minutes later. “How about ‘Little House on the Hill?’”

It’s my turn to laugh. “That’s good! Maybe a bit long, though. What about Twin Oaks?”

“Nah, we have more oaks than just the two big ones.”

We both fall silent again, brainstorming. After a while, when neither one of us comes up with any good suggestions, we let the subject drop. Mom turns up the radio and I fish out my Spanish homework from my book bag. Eventually I nod off as well.

“Mycaela!” Mom shouts some time later.

I shoot up, wide awake. “What? What’s the matter?” I peer out the window, searching for something worthy of her exclamation, but see nothing besides the same low hills and occasional farmhouse I saw before my impromptu nap. I think we’re still in Ohio.

“Look at that name. To your right,” Mom instructs, tilting her head that direction. I glance over. There is a giant exit sign with the word Vandalia written across it in bold, white letters.

I try the word out, letting it roll off my tongue. “Vandalia. Van-dale-ee-ya. Hmm… I like it,” I say, grinning.

“Yeah, I thought it was pretty too. Vandalia,” she finishes with a whisper. “It fits somehow.” “It’s beautiful.”

* * *

Our house was downright ugly when my parents bought it in the late 1980s, or so they tell me anyway. They were expecting their first child, my brother, and were frantically house hunting – a phrase I’ve never fully understood as it brings to mind couples in orange vests, shot guns in hand, houses cowering beneath their trees in fear of being spotted. Our house, a speckled brick rectangle sitting exposed on a hill, surrounded for miles by nothing but level fields, was a sitting duck.

It belonged to a dentist before us and used to be a fully functioning farm. The plot was eighty acres and consisted of a small barn, another much larger one, a windmill, silo, two corn cribs, and a few other sheds for chickens and milk, not to mention the house. They were all built by the Hines brothers, two engineering professors from Iowa State University, a little after World War I. The pair spent some time in Brazil building bridges. After the government had paid them with gold, it was rumored they buried it out where the big barn used to be. My parents still have the occasional person drop by and mention the treasure hidden out there. We’ve never looked, though.

ISU was supposed to inherit the place upon the Hines brothers’ deaths, but the two had a falling out with the university and decided to sell it privately. In stepped the Stansberrys. They lived there for probably the longest length of time, and many of our community’s older generation still refer to it as the Stansberry place. The family ran into bad luck in 1979 when the house caught fire and burned down. The only things left intact were the outer brick shell, the marble fireplace, and some of the floor in the master bedroom. The rest had to be gutted and rebuilt. There are still a few places on the basement stairwell where you can see the charred wall beneath the paint.

The Stansberrys sold it soon after they’d made it livable again. There’s some debate about who owned it next, since Dr. George Evans and his family lived there, but Dr. Evans’s father farmed the land. They didn’t stay long. After about nine years, Dr. Evans moved his family into town where he could be closer to his practice, and then it was Mom and Dad’s turn.

They had the option when they first bought the place if they wanted all 80 acres or not. My parents were both postmasters and had just had their first child, so money was tight. They opted for ten acres instead and rented out most of it to local farmers. After a few years (during which time I joined the family), Mom and Dad had finally raised enough to start transforming it from the Stansberry Place into the Crouse House.

If you were to look at it now, you’d never know it was originally a farmhouse. The process has been a slow one and even now, over twenty years after they lugged their first cardboard box through the back door, my parents are still changing the way it looks. Money is a factor, but time itself has left its indelible mark upon our land. The barn, a giant in its own right and old enough to land itself on the historic registry, blew down when I was six in a massive windstorm. The orchard, planted haphazardly in the corner of our yard by the Hines brothers (some of their old orchard equipment is to this day hanging in the garage) slowly dwindled from a variety of fruit trees down to just a pair of grafted apple trees. We finally had to cut those last two down about five years ago. Fruit trees, like most beautiful things, are relatively short lived.

The trees weren’t the only thing to go. All the original farm buildings are long gone, a giant shed replacing them just this past summer. The land my parents used to rent out to farmers is now a three acre pond shaped vaguely like a whale. I was quite young when my parents put that in – I can remember the bulldozers, but that may be because they let my brother ride in one but claimed that I was too young yet. Righteous indignation has a way of solidifying memories.

That pond is as much a part of my home as the two oaks, the people, the house. I grew up amphibious, spending most summer days in the water, and it was on the bridge that spans one of the pond’s “fins” that I shared my first, awkward kiss with a boy that I would end up dating till I was a freshman in college.

The sand volleyball court they put in when my brother and I were in high school now lays dormant, grass sprouting stubbornly around the edges. My father reluctantly took down the light pole for it this past year, an unspoken acknowledgement that his children had indeed moved out for good.

The house has not escaped change, either. Sunroom, living room, mudroom, attached garage added. Certain walls, extra doors to the outside, detached garage all removed. Wallpaper scraped off, paint changed, carpet laid out, windows multiplied. And somewhere out of that complex equation came the house that I love – the one that I dream about some nights when I’ve been away at college too long and am feeling disconnected from the life I left behind. Vandalia.

I think John Price says it best in Man Killed by Pheasant: “I’ve never lived anywhere but Iowa. This has become the unexpected, defining journey of my life: to come home without ever having left” (9).

* * *

Pella, Iowa – Fall 2013

I’ve learned a lot this semester, my last fall here at Central. I’m in Nature and Environmental Literature, a class where we read books such as Sand County Almanac, Local Wonders, and Epitaph for a Peach. These, along with others we’ve discussed in class, all address issues concerning the environment, sustainability, preconceived notions, and how to make sense of and connect to the world we live in, and even how to reconcile ourselves to the fact that loss is sometimes inevitable. They’ve made me reevaluate my own sense of place, or, as Price elaborates, “the wildlife and nature areas I’ve learned to love, the human communities I’ve called home, the flawed yet promising terrain that’s become as familiar as my own flesh” (9).

But, as Barbara Kingsolver points out in Flight Behavior, “Words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it” (250). This idea – that one has to possess knowledge of a place to see it properly – resonates deeply. Perhaps all the years I’d thought I had a pretty good grasp on where I’d come from, on Vandalia, had been a lie, a result of a kind of arrogance where I assumed I could love a place without ever bothering to ask what it was I was loving.

Nothing has opened my eyes more than my work this semester at Prairies for Agriculture. It’s a research project that looks at the benefits of prairies from an economic perspective – trying to find monetary reasons for farmers to incorporate prairie plants into their buffer strips, around fences, and into roadside ditches. The idea is interesting since it takes a more realistic approach to sustainability. But it’s also a little disheartening that those fighting for a cleaner environment have to resort to breaking everything down into profit margins in order to get people to make the responsible choice. I suppose Leopold was right when he wrote, “The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligation” (203).

Prairies for Agriculture is ongoing and will be for several years, but for right now, the team is just collecting data. Some days this means wading through our fourteen acre prairie, painstakingly counting how many native species we see, other days it’s mowing down two meter strips of land and measuring the biomass. Being involved with this process has taught me things about the land that I didn’t even know to look for before. I’m studying the medical sciences, so I only briefly encountered environmental biology in introductory courses freshman year. But thanks to the patience of Dr. Benedict, the big-hearted professor in charge of the project, and Jessica and Stephanie, fellow students whose futures include conservationism and restoration, I am learning, slowly. I know now that the goldenrod is welcomed but the foxtail is not; I know that compass plants are called such because people thought they always pointed north (they were mistaken); and I know how luxurious Indian grass feels when you skim your hand over the amber tops of the tall, pencil-thin stalks. It is, as Price writes, “whole galaxies of life that somehow, until [this] moment, [have] existed beyond sight and care” (4).

I spoke with Dr. Benedict about seeding my ten acre plot at home. I was excited at the possibilities – it’d be a fraction of the size prairies are supposed to be, but it’d be a start. Perhaps we could prove Leopold wrong when he wrote, “Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow” (199). And not only that, but to think of all the gas we wouldn’t be burning if we didn’t have to mow the entire ten acres one to two times per week every summer! So many opportunities to be sustainable with so little effort on me and my family’s part. I understood what Kooser meant when he wrote, “I can feel my will joining with that of the feeble light in its struggle to push back the darkness” (94). Yes, we could push back. It was perfect.

Except it wasn’t. Not for my parents, anyway. After I pitched the idea to them, I got strange looks in response. Sustainability isn’t exactly a conversation most Midwestern agricultural communities have very often. Quite the opposite, actually. In high school, we learned the basics of increasing crop yields and animal husbandry, not that the nitrogen runoff from our fields is causing an ecological dead zone in the Gulf, nor that tallgrass prairie is the single most endangered landscape in the world and Iowa has less than one tenth of one percent left. In our community, “going green” is an endeavor undertaken by sensationalists and idealists. A goal that’s always going to be a little out of reach. Not to mention it’s usually expensive.

When I asked my mother why she was opposed to planting the back half of our yard with prairie grasses, she answered, “It would just look weird.”

I wonder now what I’ll see when I stand on that Competine hill next summer. When the dichromatic landscape is before me, will I recognize that all that green is unnatural – a byproduct of vast monocultures resulting from the agroindustrial complex? Will I mourn the lack of orange-speckled purple prairie clovers, towering sawtooth sunflowers, the musky scent of prairie sage? When I see those bean plants rippling silver like ocean waves, will I wish they were wild ryes instead? I hope I do.

I can’t help resenting this newfound knowledge to some degree. It’s taken away the blinders, so to speak, where before I looked out at the land and saw only beauty, breathed in deep gulps of life, and reveled in the knowledge that this intensely fertile land I grew up on has the ability to create so much food for the world, now I see the shortcomings of a people who either don’t realize the terrible consequences of their actions or do realize and don’t care. I see an American culture where demand and supply justify ecological death and destruction. I see loss instead of life. Price’s words echo in my mind: “You do not deserve what little wildness you enjoy” (229). I’ve become a sensationalist.

One thing I know for sure I won’t see when I stand on top of that hill next summer is Vandalia. Our house blends casually into the landscape now, no longer distinctive, no longer visible. I can’t pick it out from the ten or eleven other houses because the only thing that made it stand out is gone. Our twin oaks were finally chopped down two years ago.

But that’s not the end of this story. Our class went on the Farm Crawl this fall, where eight local family farms showcased their produce and their sustainable methods, proving that it is possible to escape the heavily subsidized industrial-scale farming. We learned about Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, which promote local, small-scale farming. I was able to see firsthand how Prairies for Agriculture is attempting to prove that native plants would be beneficial for farmers. And there are larger organizations operating at the national or even global scale attempting to, if not reverse, at least slow down the damage to our environment.

So there is loss, yes, but there is hope, too.

* * *

Ohio, at the junction of Dixie Drive and the National Road – Early 1800s

A group of weary travelers unhitch their wagons after steering them into a rough circle, flattening rigid stalks of silphium in the process. It’s almost dark, so a woman starts the fire and the food – what little’s left of it – is slowly cooked.

The only sounds are the chorus of crickets, the crackling fire, and the low voices of the men gathered off to one side, discussing what to do next. The pioneers are headed to Vandalia, Illinois, to make a new home for themselves, but things are not going as planned. Illness among the children and a series of hard rains make traveling the last 300 miles impossible. What to do…

“We could still try? Stay here a while and try to gather up enough supplies to finish the trip later,” one man suggests, snapping his suspenders over and over.

“I say we just keep going, stop wasting time,” another man interjects. He’s tall, dark haired and burly. Intimidating. The other men nod their heads in agreement.

Except for one, a shorter man who leans against the side of a wagon, his arms crossed. When he sees the group agree to follow this harebrained suggestion, he decides to step in. “Let’s just stay here,” he proposes. The men glance at each other in surprise. “Look around you. This is good land. There’s no reason we can’t make a go of it here. Besides, we’ll be getting nowhere fast on what we have left of supplies. Be sensible.”

So the travelers put their stakes in the land, declare it theirs, and name it after their original destination: Vandalia. They realize that, failing to reach where they hoped, there’s no reason they can’t create their own home right here.

Works Cited

“Crossroads of America.” Historical Society of Vandalia-Butler. Historical Society of Vandalia-Butler, n.d. Web, PDF. 28 Nov. 2013.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012. Print.

Kooser, Ted. Local Wonders. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Print.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Print.

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc, 2008. Print.

Price, John T. Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. Print.