Friends? Who did you know? And who did you think you knew? On one hand, it seems, we want a good story. We want to believe that a particular set of facts has a certain kind of significance or value. We want it to be a mystery that we solve. We want a villain and a hero, with lots of tension and action. But when I ask these questions, a lot of the people I talk to shrug and say, "My world was so small," and they look away, almost embarrassed. And yet, even though we sometimes forget, most people were children once and they remember how it was. We don't want to think about what it is like to grow up in a small, isolated town; we don't want to be reminded that childhood is not the beginning of adulthood; we don't want to think about what it means to be a small adult in a small town. We don't want to be reminded that for most of our lives we have been living in small towns and our sense of what it means to be alive, to have a life, is small and limited. And so we find ways to ignore what has happened to us, to make it not real. We find ways of getting back at it and of making it go away, or at least distancing ourselves from it, which in fact means never looking directly at it. We want to be relieved of that past, relieved of its meanings and its limitations, and we want to forget. But that only works for a while, and then the memory stays, the memory presses up against us, or is made into an image by a writer or a painter or a dream, and we cannot escape it. We cannot make it go away. We have been made into what we were before we met it. The only question is how we choose to live with that. And the only way that we can choose is by remembering it, looking it straight in the face, and, eventually, doing something about it. It is like a wound that never heals: a wound that keeps us awake. What happened to you happens to you, and who you were then is the person you are now. And if we choose not to remember, to look away from our lives and not to think about them and how they fit into the world, then we are deciding not to be the people we are. We are making ourselves into another person. When I talked to Marilyn about the farm and what they'd lost there, I also asked her about the first time she heard there was an oil well on her property. I wanted to know what that felt like, to hear of her first awareness of the oil development. She said she knew there was oil in the ground because there were gas flares that would come from under her barn. The gas flares were a constant source of annoyance—they burned so brightly that they cast shadows on your lawn—and they would sometimes go on for hours at a time. In those days, there was a gas well on their property, and Marilyn remembers coming home from school and finding the house filled with gas fumes. "I knew there was oil on the farm," she said, "but I didn't realize what that meant. And I didn't know what I'd done to our children. But that's what parents do. You don't see it happening and you don't know what to do about it. You're in the middle of it when you have to react, and the only way to deal with it is to hope." They would go on to lose everything they had—their home, their land, their livelihood, their family, their peace of mind—and their community, too. In the fall of 1951, Marilyn wrote her husband a letter: Dear Bob, Sometimes I wonder if you remember that fall day, ten years ago, when our house stood so solid, and the green grass and the maple leaves had just begun to turn, and you started your second car. And we drove south, a hundred miles to our first little farm. You'll think I'm foolish for thinking of such things. But when one is away for so many years, it's nice to think of a home and friends and how it once was. Love, Mary And so they had worked their lives for what seemed to be a life they wanted, or at least, something they believed in. And then it all went away, like that. And here is one way to think about it: They worked their whole lives to leave home, to acquire land and land-owning property in another part of the state, where they could have some privacy, some independence, a good life. They did not grow much of their own food but they did have chickens and pigs and milk cows, and they bought their feed and their supplies in town. They drove trucks and tractors and took vacations and had conversations and talked about what they would do. They loved each other, they wanted to raise their family, they had friends, they had enough to live well. But what they did not know was that there was something, no matter how slowly and subtly it works its way to you, that will tear it all apart. In Marilyn's story of all of that, the well is the beginning of it, the moment when everything was made into a disaster. Because the well was built and Marilyn remembers it as being built before the road had even been made across her land. What was happening, she realized soon enough, was that her land had become the place where something was happening that made no sense to her. Marilyn had been born in that place, she had grown up there, she was leaving home to return there. Now she looked at that farm, with its fields and woods and barn and the stream behind it, where she'd played and fished and caught her own chickens, and she thought, How stupid and senseless and ignorant the people who lived there must be not to realize how beautiful it was. It must seem to them that there was something wrong with it. She watched as those people began to destroy that place, and to her, it seemed like their lives had made a sad mistake. It seemed like this was what it meant to be someone who belonged to a society that had built, and built a lot of things, and built too much. You worked for your right to own that which other people lived in, and now you were living in a place where it seemed that other people had no right to live in what you were living in. And so you set about to bring it down. That was how it was going to be for the next two generations, at least. It was what the world was like then, that the best way to go on was to go after those who already had all the things you wanted and to destroy them so that you could have them. They say that oil is a finite resource and that soon it is going to run out. Or, as in the song that I learned in my family about all the good things you could do with gas, "Don't be a fool, save it." That is, turn down the heat, drive a little slower. Or turn the heat up, and leave on the light at the farmhouse. Or go to the beach. Or take a walk through town. You can figure out your own version of it, but it's a rule. I think we all knew it then, but we ignored it because we wanted what we wanted more than we wanted what the world could give us. So, as you could guess, Marilyn and George took some time to come to terms with all that had happened to them. By May, the first time they talked about the well, they knew they'd never be able to go back home. They had no real home anymore. They were afraid. They were tired and sad, and they thought the rest of their lives would be this kind of life. They were like people who, once in a while, take a nap in a very dark closet, and the closet closes on them, and they will never be able to see again. And so they made the decision to stay where they were, in a rented house in an unfamiliar place. That was a new problem to deal with. And what they had always said that they wanted to do was go to California, for the sun and the sand and the beach and the work. The kids would have their grandparents' house to live in and there was the orchard, and the work there would be endless. And the two of them would work hard and then they would come home and rest, and then they would go back to work. All they had to do was figure out a way to get them all there. But it was a little complicated because of the kids, and so they had to figure out how they were going to do this without anyone really knowing where they had gone. And so that's what they did. They found a place in California that would take care of the kids, and Marilyn's mother took them in, and Marilyn took a bus to California to see what could be found there. By then, the kids were grown and gone, off at college. Marilyn wrote to the children's friends and to her own mother, asking them to watch out for their interests, as she went west on the road. It was time for a rest, and Marilyn had made up her mind to take it. In July of 1951, they got a job working in a cannery, cutting tomatoes into small pieces that could be sold on the shelves