Exactly when my family came to America is lost to times long since past, and yet I am a new immigrant. Somebody who is caught between two worlds – where I was raised and where I now live. Like many first-generation immigrants, I abandoned many of the traditions of my native home and enthusiastically embraced those of a new culture, a new way of life.

I came from a family farm in Eastern Colorado. Taught to be a farmer, like the five generations of farmers before me, I raised cattle, wheat, and millet as a boy. We were poor while ironically using the $200K+ machinery necessary to be a competitive business. I took the small profits from the crops I raised to go to college and I used the work ethic I learned to leave a rural life and cross over to a white collar corporate world. I wasn’t alone in the wave of exodus by people from failing farms to more hopeful urban jobs. But I’ve never forgotten “The Old Country”. After all these years I still feel close to the earth and my spirit perks up when I hear the distant growl of a tractor tilling the soil. My emotions stir when I see wheat in a field, so ready for harvest I can almost hear it ripen. But if I walk into a roadside diner on a road trip, I definitely look out of place in my slacks and button-down shirt next to the local farmers in their western shirts and caps. And a nice glass of red wine over dinner and talking with friends about their trip to China is savored over a hotdog at a small county rodeo. I feel pulled toward both worlds but never a part of either.

Growing up, I remember living without, the fear of losing everything in The Farm Crisis times of the early 1980s, dust storms, and hail-as-big-as-grapefruit storms, but also the intoxicating frenzied excitement of wheat harvest or a bright red and violet sunrise. The times were hard as a kid, learning to drive at age 11 because you were needed to work like an adult. But it instilled a love of life and freedom on the open Great Plains, and simple pleasures that made the times more vivid and real than many of the urban lives I see today.

The life I lived as a boy is mostly gone. Many of the small towns in Eastern Colorado are now ghost towns whose inhabitants have grown old or died or emigrated away for a better life. An ever increasing number of family farms are no more, given way to foreign-owned corporate farms. The people there who once wore cowboy boots now sport other shoes because those boots are too expensive. Times always change, but for many people the homes of their youth still exist and remain touch points where much stays the same. For others like me, a rapidly changing society takes you with it or leaves you out of the mainstream; a potential misfit in a growing economic, educational, and technical divide that may someday become a class structure in American culture.

Recently I visited my childhood home, a farm house that started a century before as a pioneer homestead, but is now abandoned and being reclaimed by nature. I brought my 5yr old son with me, 23mi from any modern highway and 4 miles from another living soul. He remembered what I had earlier told him and asked for confirmation, “Are we in the ‘middle of nowhere’”? “Yup, the ‘middle of nowhere, USA’”, I replied. But for me it was in many ways still the center of the universe. A place that neither really aged nor stood still. An example of the living earth that drove home how we are travelers, guests actually, in a wider experience.

Essential elements from that place on the High Plains of Eastern Colorado will always endure, ready for a new generation to rediscover and ever present in the memory of those who have moved away. Before it was settled as a farm, the plateau where my boyhood house stood overlooked grassy pasture where Native Americans camped and probably drove buffalo and antelope to and killed for food. As kids, my brother and I found their arrowheads, hide scrapers, and stone fire starter tools. Like their time on the land, my visit there has passed and left artifacts of farm tools and old buildings as a reminder for those who come after – An echo. Standing on the edge of that plateau with my small son and looking at the sunset, I could see the land spread out before us to the horizon with 30 or 40 miles of seeing distance and hear the ever-present wind rustling the nearby grasses. The places where we live and visit can often reveal to us things about them or ourselves. I’ve always wondered what the whispering grasses were trying to tell me. Maybe that there can be a bond between people and places that becomes part of one’s soul. Wherever I go, that timeless land with its mourning doves, antelope and hawks is a part of my bones, calling me back from time to time to reconnect and experience a place with mystery that leaves me with a calm sense of “home”.

Not much is written about the plains of Eastern Colorado in commercial literature and increasingly nobody is there to tell its story. The tale of this land I came from is worth telling. For others to understand that America is still a place of transformation, rebirth, and remaking one’s self to a new future. Being an immigrant isn’t so bad when you can keep the best from the “The Old Country” and use it in “The New World” of everyone’s future. Maybe part of our journey in life is to help other’s understand where we come from in the hope of knowing where we can go together.

– Mason