Highest & Best Use (Part 1 of 2)

A Letter to My Cousin

In the Spring of 2022, I began writing a manifesto about the use of local language. The more I wrote however, the more my attention was drawn to my hometown of Umbarger, Texas, and my cousins who have stayed to farm with their families. I wrote them a series of letters.

And they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of barley harvest - Ruth 1:22

Dear Clint, et al:

The drive from my house to your farm is only thirty minutes, but that’s thirty minutes and half my life to travel back to Umbarger. Since Granny and Grandad died, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to return. Not for lack of affection, of course, but I’ve been planted elsewhere. As have all your siblings. And all of our cousins. 

I fancy sometimes that I’ve carved a little farm on the outskirts of Amarillo, but in the six years that we’ve lived in this house, the urban sprawl has swallowed us up. The horizon line that was so clean and stark is now a carpet of uniform and angular rooftops. And mine has become one of them.

I go into these new developments every week as a real estate appraiser in order to determine home values for banks. To escape city codes and taxes, developers are collecting pristine farmland on the cheap and building exorbitant homes against the city limits. However, living beyond the city’s sewage and water infrastructure requires each home to use an acre of land; oversized rectangles with a well in one corner for drinking, and a septic tank for shit in the opposite. Other than the concrete for three-car driveways and foundations, the remaining dirt of the 43,560 square feet is covered in non-native, water-guzzling, but nearly evergreen, fescue grass. This is also a requirement to maintain conformity with the neighbors’ houses, an important factor in home values. 

On each form I send to a bank, the Department of Housing and Urban Development requires me to affirm the following question: Is the property’s current use the highest and best use of the land? For the bank, the single factor determining the highest and best use is profitability.

Thanks to my wife, and against my despair, we have broken out some of our five acres for a garden. We keep a couple dozen chickens and give the extra eggs to our neighbors. A pair of peach trees produce pretty well in the off year we miss the late April freeze. As I write this, peach buds are throwing their first pink of spring. Small consolations, but consolations nonetheless.

When we decided to break out the garden, we hired a man named Josh to build a fence. He grew up on a ranch in rural New Mexico, then joined the Army and served two tours in Afghanistan. You may know him. He sells cattle feed over in Friona now. But for a few weeks he was in our backyard fencing the garden. He came in one evening and we had a beer and he saw my copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake on the bookshelf. 

“Have you read it?” he asked.

“I’ve bloodied my nose against it,” I said. “But I don’t think I’ve really read it.” He told me he’d had the same experience but was hoping that I could explain the book to him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I had a professor in college who would only read Joyce after two glasses of wine.”

“I’d probably need some Wild Turkey,” he said.

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I’m writing at my dining room table, and I’ve oriented myself to the southwest facing your place in Umbarger. At my back and in my periphery are developments with names like Highland Springs—where each home must drill a 250-ft well—and Wildflower Village—where dandelions are verboten and walking is suspect. These developments spring and blossom where families like the Podzemny’s and the Olson’s farmed for at least three generations. Of course, my folks sold out a decade ago and their half-section north of Umbarger has changed hands several times since then. I hear one of Jack Brandt’s sons has it now, and the developers will be calling any day. Which means they’ll be calling you the following week.

All of this stretch of land between here and Umbarger wasn’t, and still isn’t, a place. It was merely land. As important as land is, I can understand why those families packed up. There was no name for this stretch; there were no communities with attendant rites and festivals and celebrations; no history and no way to imagine a future. Mere land. And according to the bank who held the mortgages, the highest and best use for the land wasn’t farming.

But Umbarger was and is a place.

The writer Wallace Stegner said, “No place is a place until it has had a poet.” He quickly clarified, “No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry.” Of course Stegner was a writer. A writer’s writer even. I can imagine a farmer expressing the same sentiment: No place is a place until it has received my plow. But I have left the plow at the end of a row and picked up a pen and I am writing you a letter. That is why I have James Joyce on my bookshelf.

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For the sake of the et al’s in my salutations, let me point to Clint’s location. In the middle of the United States of America, one will find Texas. It’s hard to miss on account of its size. Dead center in the square at the top of Texas—we call this the Panhandle—is the city of Amarillo. That means yellow in Spanish. Take Highway 87 south out of Amarillo toward Canyon, then veer southwest on 60, and one will arrive in Umbarger (population generously estimated at 164), as did our great-grandfather, Ludwig Wieck before the highways. In 1920, he broke ground on the place that Clint farms in 2022. ¹

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Umbarger and Ireland bear very little in common. Most people won’t have any trouble finding Ireland on a map of the world. But my guess is they’d probably trace their finger through England first before drifting west to the Emerald Isle. There on the eastern edge of Ireland is the capital city Dublin. The River Liffey flows east out of the Wicklow Mountains through the city into Dublin Bay and the Irish Sea, then further east to Wales and England. 

The island we call Ireland was settled about ten-thousand years ago. In the whole world, there are no recorded histories that go back that far, no alphabets that old; although, Uncle Larry showed me a spearhead knapped by the prehistoric Clovis tribe that he found close to Grandad’s place. Those people passed through here at the same time ancient Ireland was settled. But with no written language, they didn’t leave much besides their flint. Likewise, until Vikings established an outpost on the Liffey in 841 called Dubh Linn (black pool), there isn’t much known. The settlement changed hands between various Norse tribes—governed in multiple dialects—then the Danes for a couple of centuries. The Roman Catholic church appointed a bishop there in 1028, establishing Latin and Christianity. After the Normans conquered England in 1066, they moved quickly to Ireland, commanding their armies in French. In 1171, King Henry II invaded, declared himself Lord of Ireland, and handed Dublin as a colony to the merchants of England. She remained a colony until 1922.

Born in 1882, James Joyce was formed by the city of Dublin, her schools and churches, priests and parishes, her politics and languages, even by the primordial river when, as Edna O’Brien wrote, his father “decided that the boy needed a formative experience and held him upside down in the Liffey for several minutes.” He came of age in the years when Ireland’s modern soul was slowly being born breech, in Joyce’s words: “a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself.”

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On the northern coast of Germany—just south of modern day Denmark—there’s a lake region called Wieck auf dem Darß. Grandad was under the impression that Wieck, pronounced veek in German, meant Viking. The poet Donald Mace Williams, with a doctorate in Old English prosody, helped me sort out that Grandad was at least half-right; vik meaning “creek, inlet, small bay,” then being drawn out to mean “one who came from the fjords.” Old English and northern Germanic (and Gaelic) are cousins, split off from the same branch of the ancient Indo-European language tree. I take all this to mean that about the same time that Viking thanes were building outposts in Dubh Linn, they were also sending ships down into Germany where our people are from. By the 1500s, our strand of the Wiecks settled in Bentler. Ludwig Wieck was born there in 1887. 

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, 220,000 Germans emigrated to America. I don’t know Ludwig’s particular circumstances, but a country doesn’t experience mass emigration unless it has widespread economic and cultural problems. Catholics, among others, had also long been a target of the kaiser’s Kulturkampf. So in 1906, Ludwig left an apprenticeship as a baker and followed a friend named Batenhorst. He boarded an Argentinian cargo ship and left Germany for good. The records are ill-kept in this period, but he entered America through Galveston on a ship named Neptune, was hired by a farmer in Nebraska where he married Mary Liekhus and began a family. Finally, he stepped off a train in Umbarger in 1920 with four kids and a pregnant wife; Grandad arrived shortly thereafter.

A colony doesn’t throw off her imperial bondage overnight. Ireland may have finally negotiated the Irish Free State in 1922, but that was an old fight by then. A person could spend a career sorting out names and dates, political parties and uprisings, but one relevant aspect to my discussion of Highest and Best Use is the cooperation exemplified by the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS). 

In the 1880s, after a disappointing Parliamentary failure to change Britain’s policies toward Ireland’s self-governance, small organizations began to pop up around Ireland urging a “self-help” politics. Farmers in the counties and parishes took control over their own land and the crops they produced, giving them the power to determine what was the best use of their land. The Irish aristocrat Lady Augusta Gregory, writing in 1898, excitedly described the new agricultural co-operation, “There are now 243 societies, comprising 30,000 members…As a result one pound packets of excellent creamery butter are now to be had in every small town.” Following the famine—and the paralyzing disgrace of their beloved Charles Parnell²—Ireland’s coordinated efforts to feed herself was a great boon. Lady Gregory championed the work of Horace Plunkett, of the IAOS, who organized the local societies, instituted education for best agricultural practices, and even published The Irish Homestead, an agricultural journal.

Food production is obviously an important factor in sustaining a culture, but especially for one a single generation removed from a famine that starved a million people. But these early “self-help” activists also recognized the need for Ireland to begin producing her own stories and art. The activist Douglas Hyde resisted importing British entertainment literature: 

We must set our face sternly against penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and still more, the garbage of vulgar English weeklies…for it will overwhelm us like a flood, and we shall find ourselves toiling painfully behind the English…following them in our dress, literature, music, games and ideas. We will become…a nation of imitators…lost to the power of native initiative and alive only to second-hand imitation.

Another activist, D.P. Moran, “argued that no nation can adopt the ‘literature of another as its staple mental food’ and lamented the fact that Ireland chose to live on the ‘dregs of the printed output of another country.’” He even identified “such imports as a form of cultural domination”—of oppression. But resisting cultural imperialism is not the same as creating your own culture. The vacuum of a boycott will be filled with someone’s stories. It’s best to have good storytellers. 

Plunkett, the farming organizer, saw the value in collaborating with Irish literary figures like W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge on literary initiatives. Yeats, famous outside of Ireland, established the Irish Literary Theatre, and operated it similarly to the IAOS: training playwrights and actors to produce local Irish stories. He quietly lamented that the masses of Ireland wouldn’t likely read books, but they might go see a play. He also surmised that Irish children and their parents might read a certain kind of book, so he collected Irish myths and faerie stories that could be read by children and adults alike. And he worked with Plunkett to even begin publishing short stories and poetry in the Irish Homestead. “In this remarkable publication,” says historian P.J. Mathews, “it was not uncommon to see a poem by Yeats or a short story by James Joyce published side by side with an article on fertilizers or foot-and-mouth disease.” Plunkett expanded on this relationship in a letter:

I am always glad to emphasise the paramount importance from a purely economic standpoint of simultaneously developing our national life in the higher regions of literature and art. We practical folk keep a poet in the office of our Agricultural Organisation Society from whom our most fruitful inspirations are derived. It is on the friendly relations and mutual help subsisting between the two classes of workers for Ireland’s regeneration that I rest my hopes for the future…

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Read Highest & Best Use (Part 2 of 2).

1.  I have 32 first cousins on my dad’s side. This letter is addressed to two of my cousins: Clint and Ryan Wieck, the last of four generations still living and farming in Umbarger. Clint is a first cousin, the son of my dad’s brother Stan. Ryan is a second cousin, the son of my dad’s cousin Randy. Strangely enough, Clint’s mother and Ryan’s mother are sisters, having been wooed by cousins from nearby Canyon like consenting Sabine women. Attempting to keep all that straight for a non-familiar reader would have been distracting, so I combined the two cousins into one. However, the intricacies of a family with multiple generations in a community being able to understand whose kid is who is part of my point. It’s easy if you went to all the weddings, Masses, holidays, harvests, hunts, horseshoes, festivals, and funerals, but impossible to manufacture otherwise.

2.  Parnell was a Parliamentarian genius, mostly adored by the Irish people, though not without his enemies. He was deposed after it was discovered that he’d been having an affair. The Catholic Church, already suspicious of the Protestant politician, undid his chances for re-election. However, without the ability to negotiate some half-hearted compromises on the Parliamentary floor, this actually opened the door for Irish people to innovate a kind of “self-help” politics at the local level, without pleading for Britain’s affirmation in legislation. I think of this new innovation as parochialism and the old Parliamentary efforts to be provincialism. See Patrick Kavanagh’s expanded definitions later.