The Maple Zone

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

You’re traveling down a potholed road of the unconscious in the sputtering Pontiac Vibe of your imagination. Siri tells you to turn right onto Kiwanis Trail, but you know Kiwanis Trail is actually a bike path so you take the next right while she recalculates. You don’t know exactly where you are now—not precisely—but you’re willing to bet that you’re somewhere in the immediate vicinity of The Maple Zone.

Consider, if you will, one farmer Dodson—a man who’s about to find out that the price demanded by progress might be steeper than he can afford.

What the heck is that racket? Dodson groans, as he wakes in the dead of night to the sound of machinery. It’s the pump jacks that extract oil from his bare fields, the ones the men put up the winter before. They yawn back and forth, day and night, see-sawing like praying mantises, although everyone calls them grasshoppers. Tonight, the noise they make is almost like a scream.

What on earth have they gotten up to? the man says to Buster, the dog, who shrugs and descends the creaking stairs to the kitchen.

Dodson dresses in his old Carhartt and mud boots and goes out past the back porch, where he see the grasshoppers dimly beyond the warm halo of his motion-detector light. The cacophony of metal scraping metal is louder out here, hoarse, unmistakably wrong. 

Buster whines, and cocks his head at the farmer quizzically. 

I don’t know either, Dodson says.

He’s been a farmer all his life. The acreage in Southern Michigan has been in his family for three generations, and he is the last Dodson to farm it. Ten or fifteen years ago the government started paying him not to farm; part of a subsidy program that keeps food prices high and keeps chemicals out of the waterways. Dodson likes to joke with the other semi-retired farmers, over black coffee at Alpha Coney Island: Hey, I’m happy to get paid for doing nothing. 

Ah, who the heck wouldn’t be? McPherson says, slapping Dodson on the back. McPherson took the deal too, but it hurts everyone, somewhere down deep in the cellars of the soul, to see the fields gone fallow, to have to wonder on whose land, and by whose hand, the food on the table was grown.

Sleepless, Dodson sits up under the lights of the kitchen table, too tired to think, too unnerved to sleep. The coffee from the machine doesn’t help, it just makes the haze behind his eyes hum louder. 

I’ll call the gas company in the morning, Dodson says, so maybe we can get some sleep. But Buster is sleeping just fine—kicking an old leg like he’s a puppy again, chasing ducks out in the swamps at Lost Nation. Dodson and Buster haven’t been down there to hunt in years. Dodson’s hands tremble when he tries to hold the shotgun steady; his hound looks at game birds the way Dodson looks at empty fields.

There’s something wrong with the grasshoppers, he says, when they finally take him off hold. Yes, I mean the pump-jacks. The derricks. There’s something wrong with them. They don’t sound right. Dodson tries to make the rasping, screaming noise but it doesn’t travel over the line. I don’t know how to fix it, you got to send somebody out.

Dodson knew the subsidies couldn’t last, so when the men from the gas company sent surveyors up and down Ridge Highway, he invited them in. He told them how his farm was on the edge of an ancient sea—how you could squint and almost see the shoreline, there, where the land dips down. That’s where all the dinosaurs at the U of M museum came from, and there had to be oil, or natural gas, or something down there. There’s always oil where things have gone to die.

They leased space for three exploratory digs, just enough money to patch the pole-barn roof and replace Dodson’s Ranger. The new truck is twice as big, looks too new. The computer screen on the dashboard might as well be in Russian.

A man from the energy company comes that afternoon in a dress shirt and a Carhartt jacket that still has the factory creases in it. He lets Dodson take him out to the derricks and tries to hear what Dodson can hear. The dog is furious, snarling from the porch. The grasshoppers are silent.

They’re running normally, the man says, gentle as he can. 

Couldn’t there be a gas leak or something if they’re not running right?

That’s very unlikely, the man says, handing Dodson a business card with a direct line. In case he thinks anything else is going wrong.

The ancient lake, where the mastodons and brontosauruses came to drink and some were drowned, or killed by predators, and their bones are now on display in Ann Arbor, for field trips to huddle around and imagine a world before all of this—sometimes Dodson gets the idea that the lake is watching him, that long low stretch of dry empty seabed fully dead, rich with oil, or natural gas, but none yet. Great beasts with alien souls once walked this earth, the ancient lake whispers, and what kind of beast will roam your fields once your bones are in the ground?

That night, once it’s quiet, the grasshoppers scream again. Dodson, three am, takes the bird gun and loads it with buckshot. The dog whines through the screen door on the back porch but Dodson won’t let him out tonight. The grasshoppers are churning and the noise gets louder and louder and Dodson walks close enough to one so that he can’t possibly miss. He raises the shotgun like a drawbridge, and both barrels cough out hot lead and the ground shakes. Eighteen steel pellets careen into one steel machine—they clatter together, they bounce and ricochet, and one comes back to Dodson, strikes him squarely in the chest and he falls.

The grasshoppers stand over Dodson where he lays. They cluster together and cock their iron heads like Buster when he’s confused. They know what it means for Dodson to die—that the fields belong to them now. Take them, Dodson says, voice growing fainter. You win, alright?

The grasshoppers crane back their necks and raise their voices to the stars and scream like infants being born. 

Can a human really profit from the uprooting of growing things in the name of progress and industry? Or does the process itself spark a madness in the soul too great to justify the cost—a madness for which there is no cure? The answer may await us all in the future, but for now, it rests quietly in The Maple Zone.