Essays

Wild On The Prairie: Learning

Place-based storytelling is a comprehensive teaching technique
December 31, 2008

In the faint light of daybreak socked in with low heavy clouds, my 10 year old grandson Terrance Crump and I sat in my little white truck, waiting for cranes to lift off from a salina just east of Stephenson’s Corner. As we waited, I pointed at the windmill at the corner and told him, “There used to be a school here, a little one-room schoolhouse. The school was built in 1908 and it closed in 1947. I do not think more than thirty kids ever attended here at any one time. They rode their horses to school from their homes at nearby farms and ranches. I think that it never had an indoor bathroom or running water.”

I continued, “Some friends of mine went to school here. The husband came to Midland County in a covered wagon in the late 1920s when he was still a toddler. They have told me a little about what they did when they were young. They talked about going to another salina a little further south. They used to have picnics there, and in 1941 the salt lake filled up with so much water they swam in the water and even brought a boat.”

Terrence and I sat quietly for a few minutes. Someone has recently built a number of buildings east of the corner. Some of the buildings look like residences while others look like barns. All are new or still under construction. There was no sign erected to tell us what was going on, but there was a new county road sign at the corner.

“As you noticed as we drove in from the west, there is about a mile of farmland along the road. Only one of the fields appeared to still be in use. Back when the school was being used, each farmer probably only had forty to a hundred acres. They used mules to plow the fields, for tractors did not come into regular use until the late 1930s. In the 1930s there was a long drought (it was called the Dust Bowl drought). In the late 1930s the numbers of farmers and their families in this “neighborhood” became fewer. Drought put some of them out of business, and their neighbors that could afford tractors bought their land, so the farms grew a little bit bigger.” I paused for a few seconds, evaluating Terrance’s interest in my story.

He seemed to be looking at me expectantly, so I continued. “This is a small isolated farming area. The nearest farms are about five miles north. The soil is somewhat sandy in this area, but it isn’t deep sand that couldn’t be farmed. Even though the farms all had windmills for drinking water, they did not irrigate their crops. They had to hope that it would rain enough to make their crops grow. If they grew cotton, they would have to haul it to Midland to the gin, and that is fifteen miles away. Fifteen miles is about how far a wagon can travel in a day.”

Terrance usually asks questions as I tell him a story, but this time he did not. He was still a little sleepy from getting up at 6:15 on a vacation day. “They did not have machines to pick the cotton, so they picked it by hand. If they had enough money saved up, they could hire people to pick the cotton, but most families picked the cotton themselves. Kids did not go to school during the harvest. Kids as young as you worked all day in the field, bending over and dragging sacks full of cotton. If the kids were lucky, they got to ride the wagons to the gin and on into town. It might have been the first time in a month or more since they had gotten to come to town.”

I wondered if all of the new construction had made the cranes move their roost away from the nearby salina. I had wanted Terrance to see and hear the cranes. He recently moved here, a lifelong California city boy who prefers video games to playing outside and watching television instead of reading. To encourage him going outside, I have lent him my digital camera, and found that he has a great innate sense of composition. I resumed the story.

“I don’t know if you noticed the long ridge covered by mesquite along one of the farms we passed. It formed in the 1930s drought. When the wind would blow, tumbleweeds would lodge up against the barbed wire fences. If the wind was blowing 40 miles an hour or more, the sand would blow too, and so the fences with the tumbleweeds would capture the sand. Where that long ridge is, the farmer there did not leave stubble in the field during the winter, so the bare soil was just a flat surface. When the sand started blowing, the farmer was lazy or he had given up and was thinking about quitting being a farmer, for if he had taken time to plow it the sand would not have blown so badly. Underneath that ridge of sand is an old fence, still standing there. In this dry country the cedar posts take a long time to rot and metal takes a long time to rust into nothing. Wherever you travel on the southern Llano Estacado you see the fence-line dunes, and you often see an old wooden house slowly falling apart, its windows long since broken, and the old windmill falling apart.”

Terrance did not know it, but I had just told him an American Indian “wisdom sits in places” story. (Keith Basso wrote a book – Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache – on the structure and purposes of the storytelling technique.) In the culture of the modern United States we do not place value on such stories. We do not know the stories of our local history, nor do we know how we relate to the landscape. The story told of how the area was first settled and why people settled there, and what people did there. The story also tells of how the farmer did not properly farm and thereby permanently changed the landscape. Terrance has a great memory. He often remembers something I told him when he spent the summer here when he was five years old. I believe he will remember this story, and always be able to more deeply understand the landscape of the Llano Estacado.