Ordinary Claims

This shortform essay is an excerpt from my print collection, "Kindling," published in 2017 by Sweet Publications.

When the harvest rotation is slow—when a truck full of wheat has left the field, or the combine has dipped into a draw—I take a moment to walk the sunbaked creek beds lining our fields. It’s no small undertaking in the dry, ninety-degree heat of the place. I’ve worked five days in succession in the open-air sun; I sweat through heavy jeans as I move truck after truck into place for the combine. I’ve had practice lining the trucks with their dual back tires, so each move takes less than thirty seconds, but the heat is so heavy I must roll down the window (via hand crank) to drive and roll up the window a few moments later, once parked, so the truck will not fill with stray chaff. I try not to stay behind the wheel for long. In the field, I jump from one sun spot to another, from radiating truck cab to sun-bleached wheat stubble to shade, to endure. Jump in a truck—roll window, drive, roll window—find shade. Wait for the combine to move the field thirty feet back again. Repeat.

     There’s little energy to spare for movement outside of this pattern, but something about the empty creek bed draws me to wander. In the shallow ditch spotted with cheatgrass and sage, I search for small bits of jasper, or quartz. The rocks are clay red or glossy white, and, for the most part, the size of a dime. My father told me long ago that the rocks would never be gem quality. But there’s something about finding an odd bit of color in the dry gold and brown of the land that keeps me searching. As I walk, speckled hawks wheel above me. A grasshopper jumps with its click-buzz-click. Snake and badger holes riddle the ground, abandoned or dormant. Heat waves etch clouds to the horizon. Something about the heat makes the land seem muffled, stalled in time.

     The only other worker in the field who pecks around the land like I do is a wheat truck driver named Don Bean. A long time ago, he tells me, there were skirmishes here between bands of covered wagons, old settlers. Belongings were scattered, lost to the land. Gold, he tells me—there’s a lot of gold left over from things like that. All a guy has to do is find it.

     Don, who’s nearly sixty, has sun-parched skin and missing teeth. Something about this image makes me find his stories entirely possible. Like, if there was one man on modern earth who could find some cache of gold in the most boring stretch of scablands in central Washington state, he’d be the one. The toughness of the land and the toughness I perceive in Don Bean’s persona make for two parts of an old Western film.

     The stories he tells are fragmented. He speaks half to me, half to himself, as he scans the heat-wave horizon. He looks past the sagging barbed wire fence, past the crushed and rusted oil can someone’s used for a target. He looks, presumably, for signs of buried gold, though I can’t imagine what sort of signal there’d be in the knee-high brush of our desert plateau. It’s possible the latest summer storm, about a month ago, could have left new things exposed—the land is so dry that a sudden rain will hit and run, making flash-puddles and streams that fill deer tracks and draws. It’s why new pieces of jasper surface each spring—the sudden violence of water turns the land like a plow.

     “I don’t ever find much,” Don Bean says.

     But the very next break he’s at it again, picking around draws in the heat like an unfortunate crow.

     My first week of harvest I found a handful of jasper, mottled rocks with a dull clay hue. I even pocketed one chunk of jasper the size of a golf ball, thrilled, I guess, with the weight of it.

     “What are you looking for?” asks Don Bean, as I thread out of a draw to move trucks again.

     “Rocks,” I say, with a shrug.

     “What kind of rocks?”

     Any kind, really, I tell him. I show him my palmful of jasper. He nods.

     One man he knew, he tells me, walked right up to a mountain stream and found a deserted sluice box—a box shaped like a sloping washboard meant to trap bits of gold of its eddies. The only way the owner left it behind, the man figured, was because he found so much gold he could afford to. The man meant to return to the sluice box, and use it, to find his fair share, Don tells me, but when he went back to the stream the box was snowed in. Decided it wasn’t worth fighting the ice, Don tells me. It’s hard to imagine ice when I’m standing in a wheat field that feels like an oven; harder still to imagine modern men striking it rich. But I’m drawn like Don Bean to the potential of an empty draw, a good story.

     By the end of the work day, I fill the bottom of my lunch box with jasper. I have no plans for these rocks—perhaps a fishbowl, I think, though I don’t have a fish—but already they’re something I don’t want to let go.

     I’m forced to forget about the rocks, and covered wagons tipped over in fights, and all of Don Bean’s stories of ordinary men finding riches when the combine returns, calling for attention. We take what we can of the grain that we’ve planted, then move to the next field, and the next. Stubble spreads behind us, shorn short. The occasional owl dives down for a field mouse we’ve exposed—his take from the deal.

     When the sun draws the stubble into thin, stretched shadows, Don Bean hands me a rock. It is an ordinary rock, for this place, though it’s impressively round. It looks like a piece of volcanic basalt, similar to every other bit of rock my dad and uncle pitch from the field to prevent a snag on a metal plow or header. Found you a rock, says Don, by way of explanation. I think, at first, the rock is a joke. I glance closer. There’s a bit of speckled white, in one spot, but otherwise it’s an unimpressive grey.

     “Do you think it has quartz?” I ask Don, curious what he sees in it.

     “Don’t know about that,” he says, arms crossed, kicking a field row of dirt with his boot toe. “But you can polish it up, and it will be yours.”

     I don’t own a rock polisher. But I took the rock home that night in my lunchbox, next to the pieces of dust-crusted jasper, because I realized it was what Don and I had both been looking for—a way to claim that place, in some intimate way, by leaving with a thing to hold on to. Don went on to tell me he knew a man who bought a fellow out, rock polisher included. And I guess Don believed the man would let me borrow it, if I called. I knew, even as Don told me, I’d never call. That night, I set the rock from Don on my bedroom shelf, next to pieces of white mountain quartz and a green bit of slate. It still draws the eye with its unfinished grey.