Last October, I was out there at dawn with a bucket of my own. The plastic streamers on the marker flags along the strip had faded, and Dale had asked me to replace them. I’d bought a fresh box of orange flags, the little wire kind, at the hardware store in Alma for $11.
I was kneeling at pin nineteen with a flag in my fist when I heard a truck.
It was Dale’s. Not a rental anymore, but Dad’s old blue Ford pickup, which he’d had rebuilt that summer at a shop in Holdrege for $3,400. He parked at the gate and climbed down in a canvas coat and Dad’s old seed cap, which I’d given him for his birthday. He came slowly across the stubble carrying a thermos and knelt down beside me.
For a while, neither of us said anything. The sun was coming up red over the cottonwoods. A pair of Canada geese flew low overhead, calling.
“Dad used to say a chain is sixty-six feet,” Dale said at last.
“Four rods. Eighty to the mile.”
“Easy to count.”
“Easy to divide.”
He poured coffee into the thermos lid and handed it to me. It was hot and black and tasted like metal.
“He said it to me once,” Dale said. “In 1983. In the yard, the morning I left. I thought he was just talking.”
I looked at him.
“He said, ‘Son, everything out here is built on a chain. Sixty-six feet. And a man’s a lot like a road. He’s got to have a right-of-way to get home.'”
My throat closed.
“I didn’t know what he meant,” Dale said. “I was eighteen.” He turned the cup in his hands. “I think I know now.”
I pushed the flag into the ground at pin nineteen. It was orange and bright, bobbing in the cold wind.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
He looked down the long line of caps running east toward the sun, all thirty-one of them, glowing like small coals in the dew.
“That he left it open,” my brother said.
We stayed there a long time, kneeling in the stubble and passing the cup back and forth, while the light came up gold across four hundred acres of Dekker ground and a meadowlark sang on the fence. Nobody said a word.
Nobody had to. The gate was open.
It had been all along.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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