THE ARKANSAS VALLEY BEACON — Serving Pawnee, Rush, and Ness Counties since 1911 Larned, Kansas — Sunday, November 18, 2029
PLAIN TALK: We Shot at the Sky and the Sky Put Itself Back Together
by Dale R. Hutchins
Dale Hutchins farms 2,400 acres of winter wheat and milo northeast of Larned. His column runs Sundays. He is not an astronomer and wants that on the record.
Recovered press item. Predates First Voices (December 12, 2029); the writer has not heard the stones speak, and does not know what March will bring.
I want to start with the wheat, because the wheat is the only thing in this column I am qualified to talk about, and because I planted it anyway.
We drilled the last of it in the second week of October, same as my father did, same as his father did, in ground that was honestly too dry for it, same as always. And most evenings since, when I walk out to shut the shop up, I stand in the yard a minute and look at the sky, because everybody looks at the sky now, and I think about the fact that I put a crop in the ground that comes ripe in June, and every expert with a telescope says the rocks arrive in March.
That is either faith or stupidity. I’ve been a Kansan sixty-one years and I have never once been able to tell those two apart, and I don’t intend to start now.
Here is what I know, which is what you know, which is what everybody from here to Peking knows, because for once in my life the whole world is reading the same newspaper. On the Fourth of July weekend — and don’t think the date doesn’t gall me — a probe our government sent to a moon of Jupiter went quiet in an ocean under the ice, an ocean four thousand scientists signed a letter begging us to stay out of. Five days later, six thousand five hundred and sixty-one rocks got up out of the asteroid belt like a congregation standing for the hymn and started walking toward us. My grandson Tyler, who is eleven and merciless, informs me that 6,561 is nine times nine times nine times nine, and that there are grown adults on the internet who have founded a whole religion on that, and that they are called Enneadists, and that some of them are in Wichita. Fine. People have believed dumber things about rounder numbers.
I was raised to believe two things about this country, and I want to be honest with you about what has happened to both of them this fall.
The first thing I was raised to believe is that the government lies to you, and I am pleased to report that this belief is doing fine. The official phrase now — you have heard it, it was on all three networks Tuesday — is “watchful preparation.” I have spent my whole life around livestock and machinery and I know exactly what “watchful preparation” means. It is what you do when the truck is in the ditch and the winch is broke. It means we got nothing. I would respect them more if they said it plain, the way the old-timers announced a hailstorm: it’s coming, get the pickup in the shed, and get right with God.
The second thing I was raised to believe is the one I have to talk about, and I’d rather not, and that’s how you know it matters. I was raised to believe that there is no problem on God’s earth that Americans cannot fix with enough money, enough machinery, and, when it comes down to it, enough firepower. That is not a slogan to me. That is the Depression, which my grandmother survived on jackrabbits and government wheat. That is Hitler. That is the Moon, which we went to, if anybody remembers, when going was the whole point. My father was nineteen during the Cuba business and he told me once that the fear back then had a floor under it, and the floor was this: whatever happens, at least we can shoot back.
In September we shot back. You saw it same as I did. They picked one of the rocks trailing at the back of the pack — a straggler, like cutting a lame cow out of the herd — and they hit it with a nuclear weapon, a real one, the kind we spent eighty years and God’s own money building so that no one would ever dare, and it worked. It broke. And then for eleven days, every telescope on this planet watched the pieces drift back together like a man calmly picking up his hat after you knocked it off, and the rock resumed its course, and as far as anyone can measure it did not even adjust its schedule.
Nobody on the television had a face that looked right that week. I want you to understand that I noticed the faces before I understood the physics, because the faces are my area. I have seen that face at farm auctions. It is the face of a man watching the thing he built his life on get sold off a flatbed.
Because here is the wound, neighbors, and I’ll say it since the senators won’t: shooting at it made no difference, and that has never happened to us before. We have lost wars — I know it, my cousin’s name is on a black wall in Washington — but we lost them to men, in countries, for reasons, and we could always tell ourselves the story that we’d held back, that next time would go different. There is no story this time. The most powerful weapon ever built by the most powerful nation in history registered on that rock the way a June bug registers on a windshield. Whatever is coming, it has seen our best punch, and its answer was to tidy itself up.
Pastor Krebs preached on Job three Sundays running, which for him is practically panic. Half the congregation thinks it’s the Rapture running behind schedule and the other half thinks it’s the Chinese, and Marge Kittredge at the co-op thinks it’s both, which I admire for thoroughness. My wife Ellen, who is the only genius I have ever personally married, says it doesn’t change the price of propane and started ordering seed for a bigger garden, and I notice the co-op is out of canning lids clear to Great Bend, so Ellen is not alone.
And I’ll tell you the ugly little thought I’ve been having, which a columnist is supposed to confess or quit the job. For my whole life, everything happened on the coasts. The money was there, the government was there, the future was there, and out here we grew the food and got laughed at and were told, when we complained, that we were flyover country. Well. Every rock in that sky is aimed, so far as anyone can tell, at nothing in particular and everything at once, but a man can’t help noticing that whatever is out there took its first and only offense at a bunch of coastal geniuses drilling through the ice of somebody else’s ocean because Congress didn’t want China to do it first. Nobody drove out here and asked Pawnee County whether we wanted to poke a hole in heaven. But I expect Pawnee County will be asked to feed whatever’s left afterward, because that is what Pawnee County is for, and — here is the part that shames me a little — we will do it, and we will be proud.
I don’t know what the rocks want. Nobody does; they don’t say; that silence is the worst-mannered thing about them. Maybe in March they fall on us and this column, like everything else, becomes archaeology. Maybe they sail on by and in April every expert who spent the fall on television explains why they knew it all along.
But I planted the wheat. Twenty-four hundred acres of Turkey Red descent, drilled into dry ground under a sky full of somebody else’s rocks, because it is what my people do in the fall, and because defiance around here has never looked like shaking your fist. It looks like a drill and a prayer and a note at the bank. Come late March we’ll know what kind of world it is. The wheat will just be greening up about then.
Either way, something I planted will be growing.