Read Online Modern American Memoirs by Annie Dillard - Free Book Online

“What’s the matter, sorry for the old flies?” I said. “It’s a parable,” she said, and crumpled the sheet up and stuck it in the sheep-wagon stove we used in chilly weather.
    A parable, indeed. In spite of my mother’s flimsy pretense that we were farmers of the kind her Iowa parents were, drawing our full sustenance from the soil and tending the soil as good husbandmen should; in spite of her cow and her dasher churn and her cloths of cottage cheese dripping from the clothesline; in spite of her chickens and eggs and vegetable garden, she was not fooled. It was not a farm, and we were not farmers, but wheat miners, and trapped ones at that. We had flown in carelessly, looking for something, and got ourselves stuck. The only question now was how to get free.
    She knew it was failure we were living; and if she did not realize, then or ever, that it was more than family failure, that it was the failure of a system and a dream, she knew the family failure better than any of us. Given her choice in the matter, she might have elected to go on farming—get some better land somewhere, maybe in the Cypress Hills, and become one of the stickers. She had the character and the skills for it as my father did not. But she likewise had impulses toward a richer and more rewarding life, and ambitions for her sons, and she must have understood that compared to what a Saskatchewan homesteader considered his opportunity, five years of Siberian exile would have been a relatively comfortable outing. She had gone to school only through the sixth grade. It would never have occurred to her to think that her family and thousands of others had been betrayed by homestead laws totally inapplicable on the arid Plains; or that she and hers had been victimized by the folklore of hope. She had not education enough to know that the mass impulse that had started her parents from Ulvik on the Hardanger Fjord, and started her and my father from Iowa into Dakota and on across the border, had lost its legitimacy beyond the hundredth meridian. She knew nothing about minimal annual rainfall, distribution of precipitation, isohyetal lines. All she knew was that we were trapped andlicked, and it would not have helped her much to be told that this was where a mass human movement dwindled to its end.
    For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it—could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?
    There may be as good ways to understand the shape and intensity of the dream that peopled the continent, but this seems to me one good one. How does one know in his bones what this continent has meant to Western man unless he has, though briefly and in the midst of failure, belatedly and in the wrong place, made trails and paths on an untouched country and built human living places, however transitory, at the edge of a field that he helped break from prairie sod? How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?
    One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course. He