Nick Reding Read Online Free PDF Page B

forced smaller places like the Leins’ into bankruptcy,
     making them easy targets for the few families who control the bulk of land in rural counties like Fayette. With their land
     sold and no jobs, large numbers of people have left the farm belt in the last two and half decades. Oelwein is typical: between
     1960 and 1990, the population fell from eight thousand to just over six thousand, a decline of nearly 25 percent. Along with
     this came a decline in education and employment. Of those who remain in rural America, only one in ten men over the age of
     twenty-five have at least two years of college education. Unemployment averages one and a half times that of the urban United
     States. That is to say that the lifeblood of Fayette County, as in most farming areas, now sustains far fewer lives than it
     did just twenty years ago.
    Out of respect for his parents, Nathan does not use the word poverty when describing the circumstances of their lives, though any qualitative analysis would hardly fail to label his parents as
     poor. Only one side of the Leins’ century-old farm house has siding, despite the ruthless weather systems that pound northern
     Iowa. As a child, Nathan wore clothes from Goodwill. Christmas was for praying, not for gift giving, less for reasons of religious
     stricture, Nathan says, than for the financial constraints endemic to a seat-of-your-pants farming existence. Donna, whose
     parents were new German immigrants from over by Waverly, Iowa, has lived here since the 1960s. In 1968, Donna’s first husband
     was killed in a car accident. She married James, the first-generation auto-mechanic son of a Norwegian day laborer, in 1972,
     after having kept the farm going by herself for four years. Back then, with crop prices good, the average size of a farm in
     Fayette County was still 250 acres—that’s all it took to make a living. Since then, the 480-acre Lein place has become an
     artifact of a different time. Many neighbors farm ten times that much land, and planting is done with quarter-million-dollar
     machinery, guided by GPS. Meanwhile, says Nathan, the equipment his father uses has been largely relegated to museums.
    Whether Nathan will take over his parents’ place one day is one of the defining questions of his life, and one that, for now,
     remains sorely unanswered. No one understands the ins and outs of the Lein place like Nathan. Nor is there anyone for whom
     that ground has more meaning. Land is something you crave or you don’t; if you’re born with a desire for it, you intrinsically
     understand why people like the Leins break their backs every day, at the ages of sixty-nine and seventy, to keep it. Doing
     so is less a question of vocation or aesthetics than a question of blood.
    The farm is why Nathan came back to Oelwein after law school. During the three years he was away, Nathan grew his hair and
     used his college training in philosophy to try to undo the strict bounds of his religious training. Once loosed into the wider
     world, Nathan—in an effort to bury the discomfort of his narrow and isolated upbringing—did, by his estimate, every drug known
     to man, including methamphetamine. Even as he readied himself for a life built around the binding element of law, he worked
     his way step by step through the foundations of his life, attempting to destroy everything as he went. What he couldn’t destroy
     was the need to return home or the connection to his family’s land. In coming back, Nathan figures, he missed the last best
     opportunity he would ever have to get out of Iowa.
    Nathan saw his home in a wholly new light on his return in 2001. He’d left as a sheltered, ultraconservative Lutheran and
     come back with a well-honed passion for environmental activism. Locally, that passion was aimed primarily at what he deemed
     irresponsible water-use laws that both unfairly favored farmers and ranchers and polluted rivers like his beloved Volga, a
     tributary of the