I

The hills on which sit my father’s farms don’t roll; rather, they pillow and hunker down among the mountains shadows not willing to rise and become mountains themselves but opt to squat along the base of the ranges and grow varieties of potatoes and wheat and beer barley and dairy hay. The hills ascend and escape eastward up the highway towards legions of tourists in Swan Valley and Jackson Hole. The hills never want attention; never strive for anything but to house the crops that feed the world, or at least the rest of the county. If there’s ever a road sign that says “Scenic Idaho” it’s because we put it there. Those don’t grow naturally.

The land wasn’t always this way, so motivated, so cultivated. Only four generations ago the Mormons arrived at the tucked away cottonwoods along the banks of the Snake River, big mountain sage and prairie grass then covering the hills. God’s Chosen began to clear away the land and dig ditches and diversions, systematically checker-boarding the floodplain with canals ten feet wide, five feet deep. They installed head gates to regulate water flow, dams to direct it to the fields. They herded liquid survival across the high desert to their neighbors and brothers. Before the Mormons arrive, the ground was barren and cursed, but they made it paradisiacal.

But all was not perfect. No matter how righteous, the Mormons couldn’t coax water to flow up the Snake’s canyon walls and convert the hills. Instead they labored in the lowlands, fighting ancient riverbeds that had filled their land with stone and silt. They knew the lowlands provided survival but to make the hills grow would promise exaltation. The hills remained dusty and dry for years.

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My father tells me that the world changed in 1950 when a brave well digger, straddling a bucket, was lowered down a recently dug shaft one hundred and fifty feet deep in the hills above Ririe. When they pulled him out he claimed the shaft opened up into a gigantic cavern and that a river raged underneath them. My father was born in 1957; by then, his father was piping water up the hills from the huge aquifer.

My grandfather started out with three hundred and twenty acres of dryfarm land that refused to produce unless enough rain fell, which was rare. The whole operation was sketchy; their machinery repair shop was a retired school bus, his only hired help a Navajo named Woody. Things were tough going until George Lovell struck water. After that everyone knew the dryfarm fields, burnt thin and golden year after year, would finally produce.

The discovery brought more well diggers and pump salesmen and power poles. The ground became a fecund soil. Men came with large field equipment. Irrigation stores began to pepper the valley. John Deeres and aluminum pipelines replaced the mules and rubber hoses. And change—conversion, if you will—poured in like a flood.

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Tucked away in my mother’s library is a tattered shoe box filled with photos of my childhood. We lived in the valley to be closer to town though my father’s business had flourished and grown and his land now spread across the county. I’m sure my growing up is common still within the rurality of America; I’m not unique in that sense. The country kid is not yet extinct. We had our fun, my cousins and I, swimming in irrigation canals, and jumping from bridges, barns, and tree limbs.

While fishing through the box of photos, I was startled completely by one shot. Sheathed in neon green sweatpants, a blue sweater featuring a motorcycle, a pair of pink ski gloves, and a neck-warmer the color of a highway caution cone, I’m leaping from our roof into two feet of snow below. My location intrigues me. I’ve jumped, my mother clicking the shutter right as I stepped off. My form is like Christ on the cross; legs pegged at the ankles, arms outstretched to a T. The difference between Jesus and me, my palms point down. My shaggy brown hair stands on end. The roof’s eave is right behind my knees—she caught me mid-fall, and I’m frozen, hovering ten feet above the drift.

I don’t know if it’s my hands, the way they hang parallel above the backyard, or if it’s the stupid open mouthed grin that makes me think. If I was something else—some breed of wintertime grasshopper, an enormous desert jackrabbit—the picture could be me springing instead of falling. But memory solidifies the fact that gravity and my childhood were grounding me without a second’s hesitation. Still that look as I peek at the ground from high above seems to say, Going up?

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On our dead-end country road we spent endless hours shooting animals. If we weren’t jumping our bikes or leaping from bridges or sliding down haystacks, we were hunting. All of us were given pellet guns at eight; twenty-twos at twelve. We took no prisoners. My father had one rule: no red-breasted robins—they ate the hay aphids and for that should be spared. I never told him one day I got seven in ten shots.

We had the whole place staked out: Magpie Heaven, a stand of Cottonwoods in the Finn’s hay field; an elusive muskrat lived at the kink in the Dry Bed canal; a ball of garter snakes thrived underneath a discarded fridge in the dump. We rode our bicycles to the locations every day and shot whatever moved.

One time, a Salt Lake cousin shot a tree squirrel that I didn’t even see. When he came back to the truck, he held it up by its tail and said something about a true woodsman keeps a keen eye. We nodded in agreement—even though he was from the city, his imparted adage would be useful. When the truck fired up and we bumped across the hayfield, we all felt like Daniel Boone.

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Jorge Luis Borges argues that the river is time and time the river. As such the farms had flowed away from the flood irrigation and now almost all pumped the water and irrigated with sprinkler pipes. The investments the farmers had to make were incredible. They flattened the dikes, bought and buried foot wide expensive steel mainline pipe to carry the water from the ditch. They purchased hundreds of aluminum connector pipes, three inches in diameter, forty feet long, with a sprinkler stand in the middle to lie out in the crop. With the improvement the farmer didn’t have to regulate canals every waking minute. He could attach the connector pipes in a line, turn on an industrial sized pump, and sprinkle his crop in twelve hour increments. He could sleep the whole night with his wife rather than wake up at three in the morning to change a dam. Armies of Mexicans marched to the farms anticipating unlimited work—they weren’t disappointed.

The first summer that I had to work, I moved two handlines, each with thirty-two pipe, at six in the morning and six at night, seven days a week. The lines stopped twice to cut the hay. We spent the middays shooting animals and swimming. Moving pipe was a miserable job in that it was tedious and taxing. Unlatch a pipe, pick it up, walk it twenty yards, latch it, return, repeat. Flies swarmed eyes, mosquitoes feasted freely as human hands were occupied with hefting. In the morning, the pipes were ice-cold with canal water; by evening the tin cooked from the summer sun.

Sometimes I would move lines with another cousin together so we could talk as we worked. Once while walking home we chased a mouse out from the hay and it ran under the apple trees in my backyard. Instinctually, we flew after it. It scurried for a small tree along the fence. When we closed in, its random, sporadic movements—the unpredictable flightiness of it—made me nervous. I stayed back. My cousin lunged, got its tail, and lifted it up for me to see. The rodent curled and bit him on the end of his index finger. He dropped it and it scampered away. He held up the finger and squeezed pinpricks of blood from the tip. They weren’t supposed to fight back, I was thinking. They never had before.

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Historically, rodents have always been a bane to earth’s inhabitants. Their first appearance in text, according to Charles Elton, author of Voles, Mice, and Lemmings, appears in the Old Testament. Although the vole passages are omitted from the English Bible, Elton cites the Vulgate and the Septuagint translations as telling how God sent a vole plague to punish the Philistines for carrying off the Arc of the Covenant. Unable to fight off the pests, the Philistines listened to their priests and returned the arc along with five golden mice as a gift to appease the angry god.

Concerning mice, Aristotle remarked that:

The rate of propagation of field mice in country places, and the destruction that they cause, are beyond all telling. In many places their number is so incalculable that but very little of the corn crop is left to the farmer; and so rapid is their mode of proceedings that sometimes a small farmer will one day observe that it is time for reaping, and on the following morning, when he takes his reapers afield, he finds his entire crop devoured.

In 1822, French naturalist and lawyer Charles Gérard said that his town of Alsace was completely ravaged by rodents. “It was a living and hideous scourging of the earth, which appeared perforated all over, like a sieve,” he writes. The picture he paints, the devastation breaking like a wave, the “small, swift, flitting forms that infest the ground and devour all living plants,” and the inhabitants’ vain counterattack of fumigation, poison, plowing, trenching, and prayers is a futile one.

After reading the accounts of rodent infestation, it’s no surprise that Hamelin’s denizens piled the Pied Piper with praise and gifts when he ridded them of their own plague. I wonder if they ever doubted that their children were worth the trade.

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Riding high in a hay swather as a child with my father, I remember watching the small black flashes flee in the seconds that the blades exposed the ground. The mice, out in the open, flitted away from the machine’s churning mouth and dodged the huge tires. When one would flatten out and freeze I knew it was a goner. From the air conditioned cab, some seventies band blaring in the background, I saw the world relieved of mice one by one.

As I looked down from the tractor or down the barrel of a rifle, death seemed inconsequential. When I shot a bird, for instance, I usually arrived at the corpse post-trauma. They were done flopping and just lay there, wings folded in like some unacceptable specimen ruined by the spot of blood wetting its chest feathers. Once still and hard, I’d retrieve the bird by its back legs and proudly show it to friends or relatives. But if I arrived on the scene to see it bouncing and flapping on the forest floor or breathing its last half breath I would spend another shell to end its misery. Only once the creature lay down and died would I dare examine the holes, the warm body, and cover it with a sheet of leaves and grass.

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My experience with mice has been limited. The first time on the farm was in a potato cellar. Parker and I were laying out lines of aluminum ventilation tubes. Once set, the potatoes would be piled on top of them. Throughout the winter, fans blew the length of the cellar and into the tubes, circulating air to keep the crop fresh until spring.

Years before, Parker had found a discarded puppy at the corner by the gas station that he named Smoke. The dog grew into a vile animal, some type of spotted-heeler with a humped back and muscled jackal-like front legs. It ran slack jawed and sideways and quixotic, its limp tongue hanging out its snout. Smoke found great pleasure in nipping at my ankles. Smoke became such a presence on the farm that if he wasn’t in the back of Parker’s pickup, I would ask why, almost as if the dog was a coworker, almost as if we had important canine tasks lined out for the day. When Smoke did show up, however, I avoided him.

But the day in the cellar, Smoke lurched behind us, watching as we rolled the tubes off the stack and down to their places. Parker and I lifted a tube from the floor and a fat mouse scurried out from underneath. I flinched and dropped the tube on the concrete with a clang. The mouse froze at the sound. Parker yelled and pointed at the shivering rodent. In one jowl-cracking snap, Smoke had snagged, chomped, and swallowed the mouse. The dog walked to Parker, working its jaws like some appeased gator, expecting a thorough rubdown in praise.

II

My father’s main farm, up in the hills, stretched from a highway back to a reservoir that fed the valley’s canals. Once the pumps and wells became available, the previous owner laid more than three miles of mainline pipe from the highway to the lake. The old tar-coated tubes, fifty years old, began to rot and crumble. A constant job for Otto, the farm mechanic, was to load up the welder, drive down the narrow farm roads, and patch the leaks. Watering was so important that even one day without it would stunt the crop’s growth. From May to August, irrigation consumed the farmers’ lives.

I became a teen and was rewarded with more hard work. Now my middays were spent shoveling grain bins, welding, and servicing equipment. My rifle had been locked away not to be seen again until hunting season in October.

One day in early spring, my father explained the changes that would be happening to his farm. Computerized irrigation pivots were much more efficient than handlines. If placed in the center of a square field, the new pivots spanned a quarter-mile and watered 24/7. The vibrant green hills seemed to grow these long lethargic robots almost overnight. Neighbors bought them and soon pivots were the only way to water. My father had sent Otto out the day before with an acetylene torch to cut off all the risers which connected to the handlines. It was my job to take the backhoe and gather up all of the discarded steel pipes. Otto would then weld shut the holes and we would never have to move pipe again.

The backhoe epitomized my father’s concept of economics—unless dead, employed. Not until we had dragged some defunct machine to our farm junkyard would he talk about buying a replacement. For this reason the backhoe lacked vital elements of comfort and safety: front windshield, door, back window, seat cushion, radio, and brakes were all nonexistent. A sparked-out screwdriver served as a key to bridge the solenoid and starter. The kill switch was a wire coat hanger wrapped around the throttle. Both operations, dangerously enough, were performed while standing in front of the driver’s side tire.

Spring, and the snow banks had melted almost completely. The rusting backhoe had been winterized and parked, so Otto helped me check the fluids, clean the cab, and start the monstrosity for the first time that year. Red shreds from a paper Coke cup and newspaper covered the floor. Parked machinery made a perfect winter’s nest for birds and other such pests.

While the backhoe sputtered and warmed, I went to the shop and dressed for the day. Over my t-shirt I pulled a green hooded sweatshirt, and on top of that wore a thick wool lined denim coat. The jacket’s retro collar was wide and corduroy. I wore it open at the throat—an empty hole was left at the top, the remnants of a copper button. For some reason, I had vowed to never buy work gloves, so I stole a pair of leathers from Otto that had holes in the fingertips and palms. A New York Jets winter cap was under the seat of my pickup. I put it on and walked to the backhoe, its black exhaust coughing up into the dirty sky.

Like it always does in spring, the wind roared from the east, down the river canyon and pushing out like a delta over the farm. I wound the backhoe up to 2000 rpms and wandered across the fields towards the scarred section of mainline. Otto had placed a shovel in the cab in case of getting the backhoe stuck. I propped the tool from floor to ceiling along the doorframe.

I turned into the wind and it blasted through the windshield’s empty orifice. But the wind blew enough heat from the wrapped-tight engine that I felt sweat gather along my forehead. I threw off my hat and ran a gloved hand through my dirty hair.

My job was more annoying than difficult. Stretched over a mile were the abstracted tubes, thrown out into the field every thirty feet. I would arrive at one, park the backhoe, climb out, load the four-foot pipe into the front loader bucket, climb back in, drive thirty feet, and so on. Once I had a bucketful, I’d drive to the end of the field, stack the tubes, and return.

I loaded the tubes and drove into the wind. Driving back empty, the wind whipped through the lack of a back window. I had to keep the backhoe revved high to push through the loose dirt. All of the noise combined—the wind, the engine, the constant clanging of tubes in the bucket—was deafening. I replaced my hat to cover my ears.

After the third round I had discovered a new system. Instead of stopping when I neared a tube, I’d leave the backhoe in gear and leap from it, snatch the tube, throw it in the bucket of the moving machine, and jump back inside when the tractor ran past. By my fifth jump, I sweated profusely. Running through the dirt, heaving the steel tubes, leaping from soft ground to moving machinery was no easy feat. The wind picked up, and dirt particles blew into my eyes and glazed my sticky face with a gritty lamina. I tromped on, jumping, running, heaving. It was me, my yellow mechanical beast, and the fields, nothing else for miles.

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According to Nicholas Collias of the University of California, aggression in vertebrates is most frequently expressed in two forms: defense of territory, and hierarchies of precedence within social groups.

J.P. Scott, in his article “Agonistic Behavior of Mice and Rats,” explains one difference between mice and rat young: “Perhaps the most fundamental of these differences is the complete absence of playful fighting in young mice.” Rats seventeen days old will begin to romp and box with their peers. Mice will not. For this reason, adult mice hesitate much longer before attacking. While rats have a list of pre-attack behavior, mice have two: “mincing” (prancing about), and tail rattling. In Scott’s study, tail rattling, or switching, is seen as a warning and threat to the opponent, similar to growling in carnivores. After switching, a mouse will strike.

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I jumped into the backhoe and headed for the next tube. The wind pummeled me; my coat collar snapped and floated against my cheeks. Had I a button, I could have closed the coat and ridded myself of the distraction. Instead, I constantly smoothed down the thick fabric.

I threw in another tube and caught the handrail, letting the tractor’s forward motion pull me up. Once I sat, my collar started snapping again. My cheeks stung from being beaten, and now an inconsistent itch warmed my nape. I flipped up the collar, hoping to tame the coat. My hands followed it around the back and found a thin string. I yanked free the string and threw it to the floor.

I caught the mouse’s movement as it scurried between my feet. Its brown and white hair bristled, and its leathery tail switched back and forth.

In the milliseconds it took my nervous system to carry the message from eyeballs to brain, then spinal cord to sciatic nerves, I achieved levitation. My knees floated up past the steering wheel and stopped somewhere around my ears. In one graceful and gauche lunge, I flew through the open doorframe feet first. Like D.D. Homes, the 19^th century British trickster who in obfuscated dining halls hovered above party guests and royalty, I flew through the backhoe’s open door prostrate and, in my case, petrified.

When I landed in the field, I began to strip clothing. Gloves first, then denim jacket, the sweatshirt, the t-shirt, all of which I wildly flung away. Bare-chested and dripping, I rubbed my neck, my hair, slapped my biceps, and cursed in confusing strings of profanity. Had the bastard bored into my neck? Had it nested or laid its eggs?

The adrenaline hit my empty stomach. My fright changed to anger. I ran to the backhoe, which had veered out farther into the field, and from the step shifted it into neutral. With the shovel handle I bludgeoned the fat little fink to death. Then I scraped the mouse’s broken body from the floor and flung it as far as I could. The tractors would come to work the ground soon and destroy the corpse completely. Before I replaced my clothing, I shook each piece like a beach towel, ensuring the attacker had left no stragglers.

III

Fakirs are Indian holy men who intentionally live lives of extreme poverty in order to reach a richer asceticism. They employ drastic measures of discomfort and self-mutilation to do so. They lie on beds of nails and immerse themselves for prolonged times in water and hot ash. They keep their fists clenched indefinitely, allowing their own nails to grow straight into their palms. They lie or sit in one place for years and beg for their food. All this, for spirituality.

I’m sure many go home at night after a long day of begging to a loving family and plop down in front of the boob tube to catch the latest Bollywood hack flick. Sadly, charlatans exist in every world. But I’m convinced some have truly renounced worldly wealth, put their trust in something unseen, and pursue greater light and knowledge. These disciples, unlike their fraudulent friends, they’ll sleep on coals if they have to.

It has been said that the highest form of levitation is transportation. One example: Jesus walking on water. Post-Biblical texts point out that more than seventy-two Catholic saints have levitated. The power is duplicated throughout the world: wizards of savage tribes, mystics in the East, and hoards of David Blains have achieved this blatant defiance of gravity. Fakirs, too, strive for levitation, and many have been transported to that elevation. Could this be the drive that inspired Icarus and the Wright Brothers? Does the same force make men farm the hills or construct impressive houses in high places?

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After I graduated with my bachelor’s degree, I returned to the farm to work. My father talked me into it; a new venture, bright futures. The year before he and two other business partners undertook a new cash crop, Kentucky blue grass. A sod farm. My father, functioning as the farmer-in-residence, supplied the machinery and manpower. A plastic surgeon offered his eighty acres. The man who’d landscaped the surgeon’s yard became the manager. Within the first year, the landscaper left the venture for different pursuits. Too busy to operate the farm himself, my father talked me into running it before I left for Arizona. At twenty-three, I’d decided to leave the farming life for more scholarly pursuits, perhaps encouraged by the six dollar an hour wage I’d made up until then.

We had rented the ground before the surgeon had bought it, so I was familiar with the watering system. Thinking the sod business would take off without any hang-ups, the trio had purchased top of the line equipment, including a new irrigation pivot. The control panel for it sat right off the highway. The view from the concrete pivot pad was beautiful. The land stayed flat for two hundred yards and then dropped down to a box-valley filled with wheat and hay. The last manager had started harvesting in the back, so the grass butted against the pivot pad. Once summer hit, it was a sea of emerald green back-dropped by ragged cliffs and a mountain road that led northeast to Kelly’s Canyon and the Snake.

The sod farm proved to be my first real stake in the family business, and even though I was leaving, I wanted to do well. After graduation, I spent my waking hours on that hill of grass, investigating, planning, and predicting the future. While my father worried in hundredweight scales and worked the ground with forty-foot implements, I employed micro-management. I sold sod by the square foot, and ensured that each foot was as perfect as I could get it. I shepherded the small farm from morning light to sundown.

The winter had caused many problems. Snowfall was higher than usual and melt-off took additional time, which resulted in a drastic spurt of the rodent population. They flourished under the snow pack. Once the snow retreated, the animals were vibrant and healthy. That summer, my father said that when he walked across the potato rows he could feel their tunnels collapse underfoot. The rodents destroyed at least ten percent of the crops. The surplus of mice brought additional hawks and burrowing owls to feed. The birds fought for roosting space on the power poles. During the squabbles, a weak one would fall into the lines and short out the power which would stop the irrigation system. The birds died, the plants died, the mice died.

I faced similar obstacles. The mice had made a chain of tunnels that stretched the length of the sod field. This caused two problems. To harvest, the ground had to be as level as possible. The mice tunnels caved in everything and caused the pieces of grass to break and crumble. The second was dealing with customers. Who wanted a lawn that looked like swiss cheese?

I remedied the section as best I could with an old pavement roller Pops had bought at a farm auction for fifty bucks. I traversed the farm for two days straight, the wide machine mashing down the ground. From my high view I could see the mice scampering for safety when I roared over top their nests. They were everywhere. The barrel sized pump had holes along the turbine to allow air flow to cool the shaft. After I had oiled and prepped the pump, I pushed the green button to start it. The turbine spun, and a nest of weeds and garbage poofed out and floated to the ground.

After ignition, a baby mouse lay shaking by the pump until its life faded out of its body. Perhaps that tiny pink mouse changed something in me. Barehanded, I picked it up by its tail and dropped it into a hole, a burial of sorts.

The grass grew, business prospered, and the hills supported the new crop nicely. I avoided harvesting among the mice’s territory—the sod rolls crumbled when we stacked them on the pallets. By the end of summer, I’d sold everything but the strips of mouse grass. We had to harvest that too. It took us hours to take the shoddy stuff but we did it and were done.

An irrigation pivot creates its own tire tracks each year by moving back and forth along its own path, wetting the ground and pushing its tall cleated tires forward. By mid-summer the tracks are three or four feet deep in places, and the pivot will get itself stuck or high-centered. Because overwatering is just as detrimental as not watering at all, making sure the pivot ran smoothly and consistently worried me—the mode of transport for the water had changed since the settlers, but the pressure to keep it running had not.

When we harvested the mouse-infested grass we ended up throwing off more scraps than we actually sold. My last job was to clean off the scraps. I carried them to the pivot tracks and threw them into the deep spots, hoping the additions would keep the pivot’s A-beam from dragging the whole contraption to a standstill.

It was one night in the gloaming that I picked up a small piece of sod and touched a field mouse that hid underneath. I jumped back and swore. The mouse hunched up and froze. We stayed deadlocked for what felt like a full minute. I knew Parker or Otto or my father would have no problem stomping the pest. Smoke would snarf it down without a second thought.

But I couldn’t do it. Its small form shivered as the day moved to night, and in that retreating light I examined its tan body, its white little feet. I noticed my own dirt-stained knees, the mud that had accumulated in the crooks of my elbows, the soil that glazed my armhairs and palms and fingertips. The mouse’s coat could not be better colored for its life of digging, scampering, surviving. Its whiskers twitched, the mouse sniffing the air. I smelled the same moisture as the pivot pumped water behind us, fooling me to memories of summer thunderstorms and canal swimming.

But I couldn’t let the mouse run away. Goliathing above it, I surged out a clumsy kick. In the time that my leg cocked back and then struck, I decided not to kill it but instead scoot the thing through the air and out of sight for good.

The problem, I think, with immature boys is their lack of comprehension. I’d killed hundreds of animals because I failed to acknowledge the strength of molded lead propelled by potassium nitrate and sulfur.

As a maturing man, I blanked on the force that my leg carried and kicked the mouse too hard.

Its body flew end over end a few feet and plunked onto the bare dirt. I crouched in front of the injured animal. Blood spotted its yellow teeth and its front paws boxed the air. It breathed labouredly and shallow.

I was too scared to pick it up; I didn’t want its blood on my hands. I pulled it onto an oddly shaped piece of sod, its brown body offset drastically by the greenness of the grass. I set the mouse and sod in the bottom of the pivot’s muddy path, knowing that in four or five hours the tons of steel that carried the water would churn the mouse back underground. I walked off towards the pickup, leaving for the day.

But I returned—my actions deserved no easy reconciliation—and placed a heavy foot on the upturned sod and lowered my weight onto it. Beneath me, the mouse deflated and expired. When I stepped out of the track, sadness surged through my body so completely that my limbs tingled. Goosebumps appeared and disappeared in places they never had, across my lower abdomen, the backs of my knees. I looked down, imagining what had occurred on the underside of the heart-shaped sod. As darkness overtook the hill, I looked down. Grass licked around my boots and, for a split-second, it felt like I was floating.