While I am a speaker, I am also a writer and I write a lot I guess . . . at this point, besides this blog, I am commited to writing articles for 4 different magazines (mostly online but also some print) every month. I keep thinking I'll run out of ideas but so far I haven't.
Anyway, along with the articles and published books, I have several other books kicking around that haven't made it to publication yet. One of these is a compendiumof my family's "oral history," i.e., the stories we like to tell of our childhood on a farm outside Toledo. So just for fun, here is one of these tales (totally true):
My mother was awfully attached to that miserable plot of dirt i grew up on, i.e., our family farm. It had been bequeathed to her by her father, and while I doubt she ever would’ve sold it, and she always talked about how it was going to be worth a lot of money someday, and was going to make her rich.
Well, one day fortune did come calling, sort of. A big international gas company was building a pipeline. And they want to run this pipeline right through my mother’s precious farm dirt.
Now for those of you who have never had a pipeline run through your property, the way it works is, they don’t buy the land. What they do is, they buy an “easement.” Once the pipeline is put in and buried under six to eight feet of dirt, you can continue using the land, as you still own it. But here’s the catch: at any time between now and doomsday, they can come through and dig it up. So obviously, you can’t really build anything on top of a pipeline easement, because if you were to build a house on the easement, the pipeline company has the right to come through and destroy the house in order to get to the pipeline, and they don’t have to pay you a thing. This kind of violation of this sacred soil was unacceptable to my mother, so she said, “no thanks.”
Now enter this young guy, a salesperson/representative of the pipeline company, whose job it was to come around and get all the farmers in the vicinity to sign off on this easement, for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, which was $3000 an acre. All the surrounding farmers, within at least 100 miles each way of us on the pipeline route, apparently just saw dollar signs the minute this guy walked up, and they all signed on the dotted line without really thinking about it. After all, he was offering, for an easement, twice the current sales price of land in that area at that time. So all of the neighbors’ options to buy were signed sealed and delivered, and everyone a hundred miles north and south of us was waiting for their check, but the whole process was being held up because of this one stinking dirt farm that was owned by my mother. She just wouldn’t sign.
My father was having fits over this. Like all the neighbors, he too, saw easy money dollar signs, and was desperate for my mother to sign the paper, for fear that the whole deal might go south. But my mother owned the farm, not my dad, and she refused to sign. Money was not the issue at all, she said . . .
She endlessly tried to explain how much this farm meant to her father, and to her, and the six generations of family Willa Cather-esque "O pioneers" before us, and how important it was to pass this small piece of Americana on to the next generation intact.
Well, after a while, this guy came back and said to my mother, “Well at great personal inconvenience and a lot of soul-searching by the Corporation, we decided to offer you $4500 an acre.” My mother said: “nope, sorry.” And when he asked her why not, again came the explanation of how much this land had meant so much to her father, the farm had been in the family for generations, it wasn’t about the money, was about the sentimentality of our connection with the land, I’ll go back to Tara and marry Rhett, etc. etc.
Well I will try not to waste your time here, as this procedure repeated itself approximately 8 to 10 times, the only difference being that, every time the guy came out to the farm again, the price for the easement being offered to my mother went up by another $1500-$2000 per acre.
Of course, my father blabbed this all over town, and word got around to all the other farmers who had signed an option to sell for cheap, and part of the problem was not only had they already signed the options, they had NOT gotten any checks for the easements. It was bad enough for them to know she was getting offered at least triple the money; but if my mother stonewalled long enough and refused to sign, it was possible that nobody anywhere would get ANY money from the pipeline company. My mother never thought much about what other people thought of her anyway, but we did get one juicy tidbit, that the neighbors had nicknamed her “Mrs. Greedyguts.”
You would think the pipeline company would just give up and reroute the thing, and my mother actually repeatedly asked them to do just that. The problem was, a deal had already been struck with the railroad that abutted our property, and apparently it would have been tremendously difficult for the pipeline company to negotiate a different easement point with the railroad. And the point that they had selected across the railroad, oddly enough, as luck would have it, or in this case, as bad luck would have it, was right where our farm abutted the railroad. So it just kept going back and forth.
Well after a while, this young pipeline sales guy had been coming out of the house so much and so often, that he sort of become one of the family. We would invite him to dinner and sit around and tell him jokes. All in all it was an incredibly bizarre situation. Finally, the guy explained that it was the final offer, she had to sign, because after this point they would take her to court, claim eminent domain, and make her sell the easement at the original offer of $3,000 an acre. And so, at last, with much soul searching and grieving and apologies to her dead father, my mother agreed to sign, for the princely sum of . . . $23,000 an acre. As she signed the papers, there were tears in her eyes, as she invoked images of her father admonishing her to always take care of the farm. It was a moving moment.
So the pipeline guy got in his car and drove away, and we all braced yourselves for an evening of having to console our poor dear mother re: this terrible mark to be on the escutcheon of the family farm.
But as soon as this pipeline guy’s car was out of sight, you never saw anybody with a bigger grin on their face than my mother. She held up the certified check, winked, and said,
“I told you this farm would be worth something someday.”
(c) Justin Locke
