Chila Woychik

Chila Woychik

Twelve Rural

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. … We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. ―Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

1. According to Cherokee legend, in the beginning there was no land—only sea—and all animals lived in a rock vault in the sky. Water Beetle decided to explore the sea, and dove to the bottom, bringing back soft mud that spread out and became the island called Earth. The flapping of a vulture’s wings created mountains, and the animals ordered the sun to move from East to West. Then Kanati (First Man) and Selu (First Woman) were created. This is how it started.

2. There’s the barn, but the rules keep changing. Cattle, sheep, goats. Big bales, small bales, fresh green grass. Chickens that lay green eggs and geese that let their young drown in a blue wading pool. Hardheaded rams and softly bleating lambs. You can’t get this off TV. You can ’t make this up to suit the city imagination aching for rural. This isn’t the world. This is reality. This is what we have to live with. This is how we see.

3. My gentleman farmer is a mental man, preferring the life of the mind to body work. To climb upon our Deutz tractor these days means scaling Mount Everest, and to gas up the John Deere 4010 is to run a 10K marathon. But talk about Laplace transforms, wave propagation, or vectors, and he’s your man. A tractor he can fix, but an idea he can bring to full fruition, graying hair and slower gait notwithstanding.

4. A five-foot-long bull snake hung from the roosting bar in the duck house, its tail section wound tightly around the wooden rod. I grabbed a long stick and coaxed it out, scooted it on its way. It only wanted the duck eggs in the nest, and a higher platform to view from.

5. We feel closed in when the wind struggles hard and the snow grows deep, like beasts that perish at the knife end of hunger, like blurry wires strung across an empty sky, or the darkest parts of judgment. We feel closed in when just outside the door the expanse runs boundless.

6. She was old when we first met her ringing up groceries at a downtown shop. After that, we’d see her push-mowing her own lawn, taking her dog for walks, and sitting at a table while watching a small television in her front room. She sat there alone, watching tv, and anyone driving by could see her and her small

house dilapidated and in critical need of paint. So we got a group together and painted it. She offered us money which we refused. She bought us pizza. No ulterior motive, just one of those random acts of kindness, we assured her. Recently, we heard she fell, broke something, then a short while later, died. The lesson was there: we too often forget about the death and dying part, move through our days thinking we’re eternal beings experiencing moments in time. While we’re not looking, we reach a decade point, then another. Those younger than us diminish our unbecoming. They’re looking in a mirror and they don’t like what they see, but we were the same, remember?

7. Three larger people can fit in the cab of this pickup truck. Or four narrow people, maybe five. Like our farm fields and waistlines, our trucks tend to be expansive.

8. Today, peace rises along these just-harvested rows of corn and soybeans. Crops have been torn asunder, passed through heedless war machines, and the land rests. Today, nitrogen has been shot to ground, the ammo limitless, wounds mercilessly inflicted across millions of thunderous acres. There is no Aleppo here, no Boko Haram or Isis. No Saudi Arabia sponsored Lashkar-eToba seeking to cause further suffering in Mumbai or Varanasi, no Al-Shabaab about to invade Iowa State University and kill its students. Today, there is no Midwestern war at all, only a quiet surrender of the earth to her keepers.

9. Lock me up for my murderous ways: I routinely kill our front lawn grass by driving onto it in winter to off-load groceries rather than trudging up a snowy slick hill with arms loaded down.

10. We’re the product of our roots. I imagine my mother shaking her head as I shake mine. I hear her blunt yet thoughtful analyses as I analyze my own questions and conditions. Her German stalwartness, her raised chin and steadfast eyes, I see them, I am them. This makes for fascinating dialog and friend-keeping in a Facebook world, in a Twitter universe, both too often run afoul of who we are outside a few quick words or a 2D photo trying to approximate a multidimensional existence.

11. Mites from a dying chicken, scabies from the gloves of a handyman, and fleas from a stray kitten. There’s power in the secrets we keep, and we each have our own wars to fight.

12. Rural is what we know and what we’ve become. How hard it is for Iowans to believe in (let alone pay for), say, Tui Na. It’s foreign. We’d much rather eat genetically modified produce and feedlot beef, unnatural but at least recognizable. Belief is a system of repeated comforts. The trouble with a one-track mind? There’ s no middle ground. No room for awe.