"Geoff Ryman - Was" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

Was
by Geoff Ryman

This is the use of memory:
For liberationтАФnot less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom.
тАФT.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


Part One
The Winter Kitchen

Manhattan, KansasтАФSeptember 1989

During the spring and summer I sometimes visited the small
Norwegian Cemetery on a high hill overlooking a long view of
the lower Republican Valley. In late evening a cool breeze
always stirs the two pine trees which shade a few plots, just
south of the Cemetery in a little ravine is a small pond
surrounded with a few acres of unbroken prairie sod. On the rise
beyond the ravine a few large trees grow around a field. They
are the only markers of the original site of my Grandfather's
homestead. My Grandmother once told me that when she stood
on the hill and looked southwest all she could see was prairie
grass. An aunt told me of walking over the hills to a Post Office
on the creek there. I can remember when a house stood just
across the field to the west and now I can still see an old tree
and a lonely lilac bush on the next hill where a few years ago a
house and farm building stood. Of the ten houses I could see
from this hill when I was a child, now only two existтАФbut
instead of the waving prairie grass which Grandmother saw in
the 1870s, there are rectangles and squares of growing crops
and trees along the roads. A few miles distant the dark green of
trees, with a water tower, tall elevator and an alfalfa mill rising
above them define the area of a small town.
тАФElinor Anderson Elliott, The Metamorphosis of the Family Farm
in the Republican Valley of Kansas: 1860-1960, MA thesis,
Kansas State University


The municipal airport of Manhattan, Kansas, was low and brown and
rectangular, and had a doorway that led direct from the runway. The last
passenger from St. Louis staggered through it, his cheek bristly, his feet
crossing in front of each other as he walked. He blinked at the rows of
chairs and Pepsi machines and then made his way to the Hertz desk. He