Terrae Cognito

This an old essay, one that Stephanie G'Schwind of "The Colorado Review" was kind enough to take after offering some much needed suggestions resulting in many, many revisions. It is in the CR 2004 Summer Issue XXXI. Check them out at http://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/.



Terrae Cognito



Lately I’ve been digging up parts of my family. I’ve returned after an absence of many years to my father’s homeplace, a hundred acre farm/ranch in the southernmost section of Collin County, Texas where my grandparents lived until they died. As many of the generation who came to adulthood in the fifties, my dad—realizing there was no was no future for him there—lit out for the city as soon as he could.

The house itself was not remarkable in any architectural sense, as are some of the stone houses found in the hill country and other parts of the state settled by immigrants from the northern European countries. Aesthetically it was—and remains—little more than a two-story box, cobbled together to provide shelter from the elements, and little else. But filtered through a lifetime of memories, some mine, some provided by my ancestors, it was the axis upon which my paternal family revolved. Each Sunday we would all convene there for lunch, and my grandmother—Minnie—would try to make herself heard over the din of clattering utensils to apologize for again serving the same meal: fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, lakes of cream gravy, okra fried in cornmeal batter, homemade biscuits, corn on the cob, green beans, all washed down with sweet tea and followed by meringue pie. Unless she let us eat cake. To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the tea, flour and spices, everything we ate there was produced on the farm. Thus, when in elementary school one of my teachers accused me and some accomplices of behaving in the old cliché—specifically running around like a bunch of chickens sans heads—I knew, perhaps better than she, exactly what she meant.

To the casual observer, the only thing remarkable about the house is its position relative to the road that runs into town. Unlike many of the other houses in the area—most of which are now gone—my grandparent’s house was on a dirt lane almost two miles from the main road, a fact that during rainy winters frequently necessitated prolonged periods of isolation. I’ve often heard my grandparents and others claim that the farm is on the highest point of Collin county. I don’t know if this is true or not, but standing in the yard one has an almost panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, so I guess it’s true enough to make for another curiosity: unlike most of the other houses I’ve seen in the area, theirs had no storm cellar. Perhaps after spending weeks mud-bound at the end of that long bog of a driveway, being sucked up by a tornado headed for oblivion seemed a prospect not entirely dismal.

Meanwhile, back in the suburbs, life at my parent’s home was like it was for many other middle class kids growing up in a city in the late sixties and early seventies; staid, placid and predictable. We ate supper at seven and watched the Vietnam War on the news. My friends in the neighborhood
 and I rode our bikes, played football, mimicked the mayhem we saw on TV with our G.I. Joe toys and tried to convince ourselves and each other that we were glad no girls were around. Every once in awhile the sonic boom from some fighter-jock shrieking west toward Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base might rattle the windows in our house, but back then that was common enough. A few weeks ago I was surprised to hear that sound again, only to learn later it was the space shuttle Columbia shredding apart over north Texas.

On weekends my dad would obligingly drive me to the farm. There was no schedule and no close neighbors, and so I was a great deal of time alone, content to wander around our place and the neighboring farms. The fences I encountered—invariably five or six strands of barbed wire, some of wire spooled before the turn of the century—meant nothing more to me than a creek or hedge did. They were small, easily surmountable impediments, and though I recognized them as boundaries too, they were to keep livestock in, not me out. I had a pointer named Skip and we could hunt all day and never cross a road.

My granddad, whom we all called “Pa,” seemed always willing to get up before daybreak and go down into the north pasture—the one with the spring-fed creek running through it—to cook breakfast and fish for crawdads. I still can’t bring myself to call them crayfish, or as our neighbors in Louisiana say, “mudbugs.” The provender we would bring on these junkets was usually coffee, salt pork, sausage, eggs, the previous day’s hard biscuits and maybe some milk. We’d cook up the eggs and sausage, boil the coffee from creekwater and use the salt pork for crawdad bait. When lowered down the well shafts they dig, a bit of twine and salt pork works big medicine on the crawdad psyche, and they won’t unclamp their pincers even when lifted free of the ground. Oddly enough, I too developed a taste for crawdad bait, though I preferred mine skewered on a green stick and roasted over an open fire. This cut into our haul significantly, but it didn’t matter. We were sporting men of the catch and release persuasion; it wasn’t until years later that I learned people actually ate those things. If mashing the head off a crustacean and evacuating its body cavity with one’s mouth can be said to rise to the level of eating. Anyway, if it was winter and there had been a hard freeze we’d leave the sausage at the house, opting instead to shoot a rabbit on the way to camp. I much preferred this, as rabbit slow cooked in the open over hardwood coals is a meal that rivals many more cumbersome culinary contrivances.

After breakfast—or when were just down in one of the pastures—we’d walk the fences and he’d comment on the weather, animals, a book he’d read and re-read about the Crusades, all the while pointing out a fence post here that had given him particular trouble “planting” or there a patch of what he called “King Ranch” grass and tell me—again—how cattle would always graze it down to dirt and only then move on to the inferior grasses. Of course, as I got older, he enlisted my help more and more, and so I inadvertently learned a great deal about how and how much work is involved in running a place. Though I helped with the cattle too, usually what was involved had to do with fixing or building fence which—to do right—is deceptively difficult. There were miles of fence to maintain and no matter how I applied myself, the ones we worked on never looked like I thought they should. Late one summer afternoon and walking to the house from far down in one of the pastures I casually said to him that I wished all the land around us was covered in snow. Without slacking his pace he said it was foolish for me to wish my life away. I was about fifteen and at the time his comment didn’t particularly register with me, but years later—in the very act of echoing the same sentiment to one of my nephews—I suddenly remembered the source.

I got my driver’s license and my visits to the farm became less frequent until the only times I visited were for Sunday lunch and maybe to hunt quail. The long weekends and the summers there gave way to girls and sneaking into the drive-in theater, where one summer in particular my friends and I saw the movie “Stripes” at least twenty times. We could quote entire scenes by rote.

Summer ended and my last year of high school began. It was a good autumn and my grandfather, just turned eighty, sold off his cattle and for the first time, came to see me play in a football game. I don’t remember whether we won or lost, but I do remember that the night had turned off cool and I remember how good it felt to look up and see my family sitting together in the stands then later, standing with him and my dad out on the playing field. We were talking about the game, but his eyes were on the close clipped Bermuda—King Ranch grass—and he commented on what miracles irrigation and fertilizer will work. Two weeks later, while sitting in his car waiting for my grandmother to come out of Beene’s Grocery, he suffered a massive stroke. He was placed in a “retirement” home where he would eventually die, my grandmother moved to town to be near him and somebody, probably my dad, locked the front gate at the farm.

A couple of years later, dad hired a horse lover named Iris for a secretary. When she ran into some financial trouble and asked him to buy her four Appaloosas he did, thinking I guess, that some landscape horses would be nice to have out there. Somehow, it became my job to feed and take care of them and before long, tired of the daily, sixty mile commute I just moved out there. The horses had names when we got them, of course, but to my ear, Queenie, Honey, Fire and Golden Boy sounded criminally fanciful, particularly because I believed then and I believe now in trying to give animals names that fit. Thus, after a few weeks, they became known as “Crazy,” “Alpo” and “Trigger.” The fourth, a big, jug-headed, foul tempered gelding up and died before I figured out his name. I was raised in a very conservative church—the members of which I won’t embarrass by specifying here—and there were and remain some words I’ll frame only in my mind. I’d wanted to give that horse a name I could speak but nothing I came up with seemed appropriate, either for the one reason or the other.

That winter was brutally cold, staying well below freezing for weeks and before bed each night I poured automotive anti-freeze into the toilet; the one time I forgot I woke to find porcelain from the ice-shattered commode scattered across the bathroom floor. Another morning, standing too close to the Dearborn heater, I accidentally set my robe on fire, then ran flaming into the front yard where I stripped naked and stood panting and staring at the smoldering garment. Sometimes it’s good to not have neighbors.

If it was cold in the house, outside it was much worse. All the tanks and even the lakes froze completely over. Each morning I chopped ice out of the water trough and the stock tank. Then I’d run back to the house and watch from the kitchen window as a multitude of wild birds—sparrows, cardinals, robins, quail, Tufted Titmouse, and others—would appear from all points of the compass to drink the temporarily freed water.

I had applied for graduate school the previous summer and about the time my letter of acceptance appeared in the mailbox, the weather broke.

Before I left, I placed an ad touting free horses in the paper and a lady in some small burgh two hundred and some-odd miles away called to express her interest so I loaded them in a trailer and took them to her; I didn’t even charge her for the gas. The last thing she said to me was that she planned to breed them and if I ever wanted a free colt to give her a call. I smiled and waved good-bye, while visions of snowballs and hell danced in my head. I was through with the beasts.

We thought my dad’s business had survived the financial crises that were the eighties, but we were wrong, and in the early nineties we got to read that all too familiar American tale firsthand; we lost the family farm. By then I was settled in a college town and though I regretted the loss of our land, I thought I had seen my future and it was of ivory circled round with climbing vines, not hundred year old barbed wire and horseshit.

I hadn’t been in school long before I met then married a beautiful though impetuous girl who—after the double whammy of watching Giant and Lonesome Dove—decided if we remained horseless, life would be unable to rise to our expectations. I didn’t share this view, largely because I’d been around horses off and on all my life and frankly, the times I’d been in close confines with 1100 pounds of quivering, muscle-bound fear had left a negative impression on me that more than offset—and outnumbered—the few times I’d galloped off into the much vaunted sunset.

Still, I was majoring in English, and I was and continue to be susceptible to the pull of the west-that-rarely-was and all of this should serve as sufficient introduction and indication of just how practical a fellow I am. Plus, we were living on an old farm in Denton county, had land and a barn. The fences needed a little work, but that was about it. Horses were purchased.

As I intimated earlier, my mind was closed to the farm—or the idea of the farm—as it were, but soon found as a memory it was unkillable. For years I’d had dreams about my grandfather, some the normal memory-type, conversational in tone, and after the manner that we’d just be somewhere talking. In some he, I, or both of us knew he was dead; others were as if he’d not crossed. Falling back into the rituals of animal husbandry made them more and more frequent events of my nights and waking, I found myself constantly wishing I’d paid more attention those long years before when I was helping him, taking his instruction like an inattentive automaton.

The dreams continued. Most were maddeningly non-specific, and I frequently couldn’t make out what we were saying, but in the logic of the event, all made sense. Others were perfectly clear, but so mundane as to seem useless. In one such dream we were in some strange building—one I’ve never seen again in dreams or elsewhere—and he asked why I never went to church anymore and I told him I didn’t know and he just shrugged his shoulders and walked off, leaving me standing there alone. Still, that’s the terrain the dreamer negotiates, willing or not.

Now I found myself desperately needing some inside information, the distillation of a life spent far from cities and the abattoir of the nine to five. I needed the lessons of his life, which—after some new law had cleared congress and was wreaking havoc with the farmers and ranchers—had led him to remark that when he was growing up all they knew about the federal government was to not shoot the mailbox.

But he was gone. Working with the horses and tending the place, I found myself in a sort of waking dream where sometimes I intuitively knew what to do but all too often faced a situation—colic in one of the horses, or how to twist a clean splice with the cat’s claw pliers say—and knew that once I’d had access to the skill, but would now have to feel my way along. Sometimes there were unexpected bursts of competence, but usually they were like a summer storm, brief and inconsequential.

My wife became increasingly disinterested in the horses and finally, tired of “all this ag-world shit…” moved to New York City, looking for something that had fallen extinct for her here in Texas. Before she left, I was trying one last time to convince her that obligations were a trust to be honored and she answered me in way I’ll never forget. We were standing out by the catch pen and she had her arms draped across the top of the gate, one of her handmade M.L. Leddy boots resting easy on the bottom rail. She turned her pretty face to me and everything she had to convey was contained in her smile, fleeting and terrible.

As for many who go through this stage of love, darker times soon followed and those obligations—as well as the concern of family and friends—were all that kept me from spiraling into complete disarray.

Five years unfolded in that stand-still blur that is time’s calling card, during which I had met another woman, settled down and fathered a son. “Logan,” an old family name for us, is what we named him.

Then, as frequently happens when it seems the storm has passed, circumstances specific to the laws of supply and demand cornered us and we were given notice that the land we were leasing and where we ran our horses had become—in anticipation of “positive growth projections”—prime real estate. More than once I had seen the subdividers darting about, circling the area in their helicopters, looking for “unimproved” land and standing at the top of the hill and taking in the view, it was easy to see the attraction. When we had leased the place it was overgrown with brambles, scrub cedar, hackberry, elm and other so-called “trash trees,” but through hard work and no little outlay of money, we had cleared most of it, built a corral, a round pen, and a shed, bringing it back into production. With its freshwater creek, hills and sandy loam it was perfect for horses and there ours had thrived. It was hard not to be angry and resentful, so I didn’t try.

All of this occurred before the well documented implosions of WorldCom, Enron and the disappearance of a plethora of “dotcom” businesses, the expansion of which had brought veritable multitudes to the region, and who—like a plague of locusts—swarmed over the area, appropriating everything in sight. Grazing land that had been open from the time of the buffalo collapsed seemingly overnight under a barrow of concrete.

We had about a month, two at most. The only option immediately available was to move the horses to a boarding stable, and agreeing to let them fleece me for roughly three times what I’d paid for a sixty acre grass lease and a house. On the way down to finalize the deal I was trying to talk myself into believing it wouldn’t be so bad, and that riding in an arena—which the stable provided—would be a nice change. I pulled up to the gate, only to find it outfitted with a bright new logging chain and a padlock the size of my fist; all the horses were gone. On the same spot a few weeks later, a Wal-Mart “Neighborhood Grocery” was having its grand opening sale. The location of the two stalls I had contracted for was where roughly 2500 brand new shopping carts stood parked, ready to be filled with unnecessary plastic objects.

I’d like to say that I had a dream in which my grandfather appeared to give me direction, but it didn’t happen. I was just running out of time and running out of options. Of course, I could always have taken the horses to the sale barn and hope for the best, but it was a longshot. Folly was a gelded Thoroughbred with no racing prospects whatsoever, and with the largely undeserved reputation his breed has acquired for unpredictability, getting him sold as a trail horse seemed doubtful. Viejo was nearing thirty; at auction only the killer buyers would look at him, and that merely to judge his weight.

So I did what I’ve always done in the past, I drove around looking at stuff. It seems that all of the higher-end subdivisions in this part of Texas are given euphemistic names such as Twin River Estates, Hunter’s Glen, Robson Ranch—names intended to evoke images of bigger skies and endless, albeit manicured, lawns. A billboard advertising “Timber Creek Ranch” piqued my curiosity and though I knew what it would be, I drove out there anyway. I pulled through a massive, ornate brick and limestone gate that opened onto an old cowpasture and looked around. There was no creek whatsoever and what little timber there was had been bulldozed into a pile, waiting to be burned. I visited another one named Cielo Ranch and though my horizon of expectations was low, I was still dismayed to find that, far from heaven, it was a perdition of abandoned excavations, concrete forms, twisted rebar, oil drums and shredded trees. Everywhere the tracks of heavy machinery led from scene upon scene of confused destruction. A water main had burst—or been left on purposefully—for the entire area was a mud-flat that reminded one more of the Ypres Salient, circa 1917, than any heavenly ranch I would care to conjure. I left and lost myself in a reverie of sorts, driving from one construction site after another, marveling at the three and four hundred thousand dollar homes, row upon row, parked on one to five acre plots in former cotton fields and pasture land. I had the irrational thought that there must be entire states with no people in them. Finally, I passed a pasture bristling with surveyors stakes, a shiny CAT D-6 bulldozer ready to go to work on the trees and fences and in the shade of the yellow beast a swaybacked, quarter-type horse standing motionless. It was then I realized what I had been putting off so long, made a U-turn and pointed my truck northwest. An hour later I was gazing up an all but disappeared driveway.

What I mostly remember from that day, when I bumped and lurched up the long gravel drive to our old farmhouse was the complete and utter feeling of what the word “neglect” truly means. It had been twelve years since I’d last pulled into the yard and I shut the truck off and sat there peering through the dust-streaked windshield while the cooling engine ticked under the hood. After a few minutes I stepped out of the truck and into a bedlam of weeds and sunflowers, punctuated by trash of every description, a washing machine, barrels, tractor and lawn mower parts, destroyed cars. I walked around in dismay, gawking like a tourist. In the weeds by the chicken coop I found one of those plastic plates that children make for their parents in grade school. The crude drawing was of a smiling stick figure man wearing a hat and walking with hands outstretched like a somnambulist across a flat wasteland with the sun, one cloud and two rockets soaring overhead. The date read 1970; the initials were mine. If anyone could have told me when I was drawing on that plate that thirty years later I’d find myself standing in a familiar wilderness clutching it in my hands I would have run. Hard.

I stepped into the house and took it in. The plaster in the living room was chipped and cracked and the floor was carpeted with old magazines, newspapers and trash. The dining room, site of so many boisterous family dinners, was silent and smelled of cats. The kitchen had been stripped of all appliances, though someone had hung an old mirror that belonged to my grandmother over the sink. I stepped into the south bedroom and looked at the faded blue walls, only slowly remembering that years before I had painted it with the help of a girl I was in love with. Undecipherable graffiti that looked like some bastard child of Cyrillic and Sanskrit was scrawled everywhere. Walking through the filthy house, I felt the displacement and anxiety a ghost must feel. That and something close to sadness, but not quite. Longing perhaps.

I asked around town and found the owner, who, after I talked to him for a while, said he’d lease me the farm and seemed pleased to do so. I called Four Brothers Tractor that afternoon and told them to send a skid-steer Bobcat; when it arrived the next day I went to work. The fences were all shot anyway, so I knocked down what was left. While I worked outside, all my thoughts were directed toward the house. The detritus and miscellaneous junk left by the previous tenants was so scattered and varied they must have viewed my grandparents home the perfect dump. It took almost a full week, but when I was finished I had pushed up a pile of trash the size of two school busses behind an old loafing-shed; the rest of the immediate area I had scraped barren as an old man’s prospects.

The horse lot and the yard around the house wouldn’t have taken all that much time to clear, but for the fact that I kept finding things that had belonged either to me, my father, my father’s father or all of us at various times. It would be tedious for anyone but me to read a catalog of all I found, but the short list includes my grandfather’s old draw knife, an incomplete set of wooden dominos, a porcelain doll’s head—which to the best of my knowledge didn’t belong to any of the men—a china bird that had survived intact who knows how many vagaries of chance and many other items seemingly ad infinitum. A mule-drawn breaking plow and three draglines. In the attic of the house I discovered a cigar box that contained a vitriolic letter my dad had written at age nine, dated the eighth of December, 1941; it was addressed to Tojo.

Walking the old corral and making my plans I found the hay hook a blacksmith named “Buckshot” had made for my grandfather from one of the tines of an old mule-drawn hay rake. Only the curve of the handle was sticking up out of the black dirt and I didn’t notice it until it hooked the tip of my boot, pulling me off-balance physically in much the same way the past—and the relics of that past—had pulled me emotionally since the day of my return. I pulled it free of the ground and turned it in my hands, looking it over as if for the first time and wondered again how a memory so utterly forgotten can reconstitute itself with little more than a powdering of blackland dirt and some surface rust to show for it.

Logan and I built fence for the next few days, which is an activity I’ve had a lot of experience with. My grandfather, of course, had taught me and this time I ran the show all the way from planning from whence and to where, the materials we’d use and all the other details. His job was to bring the fencing pliers, fence stays, grasshoppers, sticks and the many other things that four-year-old boys know to be of import but that guys like me have forgotten. Coyote skulls and spent shotgun shells. We worked steadily—anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half a day—all that week and part of the next, stopping only when we had to go play.

I know that in today’s political climate it’s considered incorrect to play Cowboys and Indians as well as admit the judicious usefulness of handguns to our children. But since no one else will, I’ve decided to embrace what I have become and that’s a product of my upbringing. So most days Logan I would knock off fence building to go hunt bad guys and bring them to justice. We only failed to do this when we were the bad guys and had to hide out in the creek bottom, looking for arrow heads, turtles, and discussing the old wall of unfired clay brick my grandfather believed had been built either by the Kiowa or the Comanche, all the while entertaining the futile hope we could elude the posse of one, a grim law person who looked suspiciously like mommy.

When our fence was built we looked at how it listed this way and that, how some of the wires were taut as a guitar string while others sagged almost to the wire beneath and we pronounced it complete. Standing there with my son and comparing it those fences I’d helped my grandfather with, I realized something perhaps I knew as a boy, but forgot along the way.

A week later we were back in Denton County, watching Folly and Viejo as they whirled and tossed in the horse trap. We’d caught them like we always do, with a bucket of feed, but they’d read the air. The intelligence of the horse is often called into question and certainly they provide plenty of damning evidence against themselves. But intelligent or not, the horse can gaze into the human mind as easily as a child into a candy jar and ours knew things were about to change.

Still, they had nowhere to go and were soon loaded in the stock trailer, headed for Collin County. We arrived without incident, pulled into the corral and stopped. It was late afternoon and the sun was going down. I put Logan in the bed of the truck while I backed each horse separately out of the trailer. I turned Viejo loose first, knowing he’d wait. Then it was Folly’s turn. I unbuckled the halter and slipped it over his nose. He trotted around and around in increasingly larger circles, getting his bearings, testing the wind and of course, reading my mind. Then he turned and headed straight for the back gate which I purposefully had left open, Viejo trotting right behind him.

On the highest point of Collin County, my son and I stood in my grandfather’s old horse lot and squinted against the dying sun. I looked over at Logan and admired the way the sun coppered his face and fired flecks of red gold from his hair and how he grinned like a young wolf as he watched the two horses galloping westward into their new world.