Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Jen’s fallback position was that everything would work out because it always had. She was an optimist — the last Guthrie pessimist had been Jen’s great-uncle Oliver, father of Donald, who’d gone to the old schoolhouse with Joe and Frank. Oliver had lived to be ninety-five even so; the Guthries saw this as a proof of the power of positive-thinking genetics. Jen was a lovely girl, and very sweet, but she wouldn’t have a stockpile in the house — she thought it was bad luck and bad faith. The Guthrie motto was “Do what you want to do, and everything will be fine.” Wasn’t her second child nicknamed Perky? And a third one was on the way — Jen had driven to Iowa City at the end of June for an ultrasound, and was unsurprised to discover that little Felicity was healthy and already, at twenty weeks, sucking her thumb.

Joe couldn’t tell if Minnie was worried about the drought (there, he had thought the word). She kept her thoughts to herself, smiled when you looked at her, and didn’t say much. This had always given Joe the feeling that she knew more than she was prepared to divulge. Everyone loved Minnie, including Lois, who was a little afraid of her (but, then, Minnie was a little afraid of Lois). However, should the disaster befall, no matter what it was, anything from a well drying up to the End Times (something Pastor Campbell liked to refer to), you had the feeling that Minnie would sigh and carry on, whether raptured up or left behind, and nothing about either experience would flummox her in the least.

As for Joe himself, he fell back on memories. He knew exactly when the last drought that was this bad had been—1936, the year his uncle Rolf hanged himself in the barn. He’d been fourteen; Rolf would have been a year or two younger than his mother, Rosanna, probably he was not even thirty-five when he did it. Since Joe had turned sixty-six in March, thirty-five now seemed to him awfully young to give up. But he remembered how old Rolf had looked to him then, how desperate, how trapped on Grandpa Otto’s farm. He remembered in particular Grandpa Otto standing in the barn doorway, yelling at Uncle Rolf in German about something, waving his arm toward the dusty fields and the wizened corn crop. What had been Rolf’s fault or mistake? Joe hadn’t known enough German to understand. Rolf’s death had overshadowed the fact that on their own farm his father, Walter, had gotten only twenty-three bushels an acre that year for the corn, and sixteen for the oats (though they were then mostly growing the oats for themselves and the animals — the oats and the straw did get them through that winter, if only just). This year, already on the first of July, the farmers who fed cattle were talking about selling them off — the corn crop could fail entirely. But it never had. In 1953, the year Joe took over the farm after his father died, he got fifty-six bushels an acre and was thrilled; three years ago, he and Jesse were quietly proud of 126 bushels an acre — they’d have settled for 110. Walter would have shaken his head in suspicious disbelief: not going to get ten cents a bushel for that, he’d have said. And Rosanna would’ve said he was spoiled rotten. Joe stretched his left shoulder, pressed the spot that always hurt with his right thumb, and vowed not to throw Rocky’s tennis ball today, even though Rocky brought it to him and dropped it at his feet. Joe kicked it; it rolled away. Rocky glanced at him in disbelief, then ran after it. Snickers was lost in the dusty corn, hunting rats for sport.

Joe picked up the little shovel beside the pen and went in — one mess in the back corner, which he scooped up and tossed out into the weeds (nutrients in dog shit, too). Then he filled the water bowls. Lois had put her foot down about no dogs in the house at night, and no dogs on the new couch, and no dogs alone in the kitchen since last summer, when she happened to come in from the garden and see Snickers, his paws on the edge of the counter and the cooling carrot cake between his jaws. He called the dogs and went inside, pausing to turn the face of the thermometer that was hanging there to the wall. Maybe that was Joe’s fallback — the less you think about it, the better.

—

WHEN RILEY GOT UP to go to the bathroom, she tried to be quiet — if she wanted to get back to sleep, she had to think some blank thought like “blah blah blah” so as to not worry about anything — but she’d made the mistake of looking out the bathroom window, and she saw lightning off to the west. She stood there staring at the brilliant, silent forks that looked like the nervous systems of giants stalking over the peaks. She could hear no thunder, though, since the storm was far away. That was it for sleep. She went into the living room of their one-bedroom; outside the front window, which looked over the town, everything was calm — only occasional brightening reflections of the drama to the west. She sat in a chair in her T-shirt, waiting for the apocalypse. She thought it wouldn’t take long — it was already happening in Yellowstone, where hundreds of thousands of acres had burned and the Forest Service was not even close to containing it.

All of this Charlie gathered when he got up, admittedly after nine-thirty, to find Riley sitting over her third cup of coffee. Charlie was a heavy sleeper. His hours at the outfitter’s were cut back because of the failure of the tourist season, and no one was rafting because the rivers were so low, but he and Riley had savings from the previous two years, so he was a little lazy lately. The TV was on, and so was the radio. Riley needed to know about any wildfires off to the west. As soon as Charlie said, “Why would there be—” she threw back her head and rolled her eyes about the Forest Service. Charlie had the expert opinion to back him up. The Forest Service had blown it for years, suppressing every fire, by law, by 10:00 a.m. the day after it started. But they’d changed that policy. Now that the Forest Service allowed naturally set fires to burn themselves out, the undergrowth was being cleaned up instead of being allowed to accumulate around the bases of the lodgepole pines, 250-year-old lodgepole pines at the end of their natural life cycle, acting as tinder for the next lightning strike. It was not certain, but why not hope for the best? It was entirely possible, with controlled burns, that the problems would be eased, here in Colorado and elsewhere, without a second Yellowstone taking place. And the pines could be carefully thinned. Yellowstone was a lesson, deserved, but also well learned—

Riley jumped out of her chair and took her cup to the sink. He just didn’t get it, did he? In the first place, the Yellowstone fire had started when weather conditions caused controlled burns to get out of control , and in the second place, the drought this year was the sign of things to come, that the ecosystem was going through a permanent shift.

Right about then, Charlie actually got himself together. He said, “What happened?”

That’s when she told him about the lightning strikes she’d seen. He adjusted his shorts. He was not angry. He recognized that if you grew up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, if your grandfather was a locally prominent Native American artist who lived on the Menominee Tribal Lands, where your mother had lived until she was twelve, if you studied the Peshtigo Fire in fourth grade, it was much like growing up in St. Louis and studying the Missouri Compromise. Then she said the word, the hot-button word. It was “Hansen.” The button that the word pushed was not Charlie’s, it was Riley’s own button. James or George Hansen or Hanson was a physicist or a climatologist who measured long-term temperature changes on Earth as well as on Venus; according to him, the last ten years had contained some-number of the hottest years in the last number-of-years. Charlie’s inability to remember the details was a simmering problem between them. He did know that Hansen had gone to the University of Iowa. Since Charlie had been there, and driven around downtown Iowa City on his way back to St. Louis, Iowa was now fixed in his mind. He’d also thought about his new aunt Tina, in Sun Valley — just Saturday, at the shop, he’d asked Bob how far Sun Valley was from the fires, and Bob had said he thought maybe three hundred miles west, which was safer than being three hundred miles east.