Wapanucka Journal: Returning to Roots during the World’s Quarantine

The Scene:

On January 14, 2014, my older brother Bill, was killed instantly in a head-on auto accident on a rural, two-lane blacktop near Caddo, Oklahoma. He was living on a 54-acre farm near Wapanucka, Oklahoma and was returning from a Walmart in Durant after purchasing his weekly groceries. His wife, Kitty June, had passed away ten years earlier and only the eldest of his three sons, Billy, survived him. He left CD bonds to several sisters-in-law and Billy; and left his modest estate, which included his farm, to me. Several months later, his surviving son used his CD to pay for an over-due hernia operation after which he went home and died in his sleep that night.

It took a year to probate Bill’s will during which I traveled from my home in Austin, Texas, to his farm bi-weekly and lived in his old farm house. He had bought the place in 1992 and remodeled the house by adding a den and deck where they spent much of their time watching TV received from a satellite dish. The deck had originally been fitted with a hot tub; the den with a camel bar that was acquired during a tour the Air Force sent Bill, a career NCO, to Germany with Kitty and their three young sons. The sons had helped rewire and build the den and decks where their extended families occasionally gathered. The place was cozy and comfortable but fraught with photos, folk architecture, and randomly-assembled archeology of a family no longer on Earth. 

At 69 years of age and on an instinct that I could do something environmentally useful with the place,  I decided not to sell the farm but see what I could do to manage it into something that might mitigate the damage done by the local mineral mining and cattle ranching culture that crudely extracted and despoiled natural resources while returning none. The local voters are largely Republicans; 80 percent of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016, they will probably rationalize a way to do it this year.

After five years, there has been some modest success at restoring the south half of the farm and putting an organic vineyard in the center. A 3000-yard dam built across a raw ditch had yielded two acres of surface water grows monthly as blue-collar family of beavers add to the dams. Cranes and ducks have seeded the pool with fish, frog and turtle eggs; those mature and produce two-pound + bass, families of lazy, sunning turtles and an army of frogs of all octaves. The geese, ducks and frogs frequent the pool each night; they quack and croak loudly starting somewhere near dusk. I have designated them the Enterprise Frog and Duck Ensemble --  they have a fantastic wind section but their percussion section sucks! (Enterprise” is the name of an extinct township a half-mile away that once populated a one-room schoolhouse but now has only a cemetery and a cellar left from the school that closed 30 years ago.)    

  

During the first three years of my travels to the farm, my partner, Karin, and I planted 400 hardwoods in the southern area and then another 400 Bois ‘d Arcs along a western boundary that parallels a county road. Those thorny trees will hopefully form a hedgerow and keep four-wheelers off the place. 

Back in Austin I have two daughters, two grandchildren, a former wife, Judy; and Karin, my wonderful partner whose compulsiveness is perfectly suited to farm work at the farm. The neighborhood nonprofit I have worked with for almost 40 years struggles through new challenges but presently peacefully sleeps 130 poverty-level households under safe roofs each night. (That’s another story I am working on.)

As the Covid-19 Virus presently boils through Austin, my family concurs, that at 74, I am safer in Wapanucka. So I have taken Shirley, my four-year old border collie, and hunkered down here. While it is a painful separation, it is also an opportunity to try to catch up with farm work: the past two years have brought a deluge of rain that banished tractors from the fields and I am far behind with the vineyard and with trimming scrub elms that threaten to choke the hardwoods. 

Tell me the climate isn’t changing! I have been rooted in this remote country 70 years and I have not seen such drastic weather. Even as the rain falls in torrents, I build cisterns to water the vineyard wondering when the next drought will come.

But since retreating here on March 11 I have witnessed, for the first time since I was 18, the magic change of seasons from winter to spring. Each day brings a new plant or frog, or hawk, or eagle, or deer, or terrapin, or flower,  or coyote, or skunk, or possum. 

That is where I am; and that is what I share.

April 17, 2020