Oregon Humanities

The Away Child

Rachel Klippenstein, Lakeview

I was the away child, the one who did not live close to my family. I migrated with my husband and our two young sons from Pennsylvania to western South Dakota. With hard work and great enthusiasm we developed a herd of purebred cattle. The land dictated that these animals be bred for structurally sound legs and hooves to cover two-thousand-acre pastures, bred to develop tight sheaths to prevent accumulating burrs. Selective genetics for natural muscling and the strong dry-land gramas, wheat, and buffalo grasses contributed to hearty calves at weaning.

We adapted to the land. If ranchers did not abide by the land’s idiosyncrasies, it would toss us about, bruising body and soul. Yet, at the same time, it could teach appreciation for abundance when timely rains softened dormant alfalfa seeds into sprouting, appreciation for the live calf born at minus 20 degrees.

As the away child, I connected to the visceral aspects of my life, like the lightning bolt that set a dangerous grass fire in motion, threatening our house and cattle. I ran to open gates so the cows could escape the flaming fields. And suddenly, a quarter inch of rain doused the burning. Highs and lows often came together like that on the prairie. And even during the depressing years of low cattle prices, I did not blame the land. As the away child, I loved the land.

Outside forces—dairy buy-outs, the grain PIK program, and the stroke of a presidential pen enacting a freeze on beef prices—worked against ranchers. Federal Land Bank loan interest rates rose to nearly 18 percent. During the Farm Crisis years of the early 1980s, the economist Paul Volcker remarked that one Chase Manhattan bank could swallow all of the small town western banks, meaning middle America was of no consequence to the Washington power brokers. Not working harder or smarter could stave off the inevitable.

The away child grown older, I was now a maturing woman in her forties. I never expected to give back our beloved land, ship our cattle to the stockyards to satisfy loans, and move away.

I became displaced from my roots, my community, my reason for being. The agricultural glue was drying out and crumbling.

Away took on a meaning I didn’t want to experience. I moved in with my parents in a Florida city. I took jobs selling carpet and building concrete forms. Eventually my husband and I took a job managing a herd of cattle in Oregon, but always with a sense of displacement. I was not only distanced from the family I loved, but the prairie I had once felt a part of.
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From Fall/Winter 2009 Away_