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Show Father took a triumphant joy, which I cannot recall without a shadow of sadness, in bringing Mother and us the best fruits of his gardening from vegetable plots, berry bushes, mulberry and other small fruit trees. Without boasting he was proving that even in his seventies he had achieved something like a modest triumph over the desert. He could give us enjoyment won toilsomely against the obstacles that had defeated him many times. Can Any Good Thing Come Out of Nada? That wistful sign "Grandview Ranche," reared over a shack of unpainted pine boards cupping in the sun, said something above our purposes. We were seekers seeking everything that human beings have ever sought. Embedded in American materialism like flies in amber?-of course we. were, as most of the Way~flower colonists were when they set foot on the Rock. Most of the Pilgrims were spurred by "mere" economic goals, or so 20th century historians have told us. But there was a seed of something else. At Nada we felt all the hungers from the lowest to the highest, just as at Plymouth the humble worker and the scholarly mystic in the purest moment of his meditations did. The latter only saw more clearly after long suffering. That sign might have read "Great Western Wheat Farm" or "Great Basin Cattle Ranch." That homesteader with the view cherished a delusion that his rectangle of desert had to have something very special about it. And that was silly. But what he and his wife chose to see was not a hundred acres of cabbages to come, or a thousand acres of wheat, or ten thousand acres of range swarming with fat Herefords, but the splendor of the vista. There was undoubtedly a certain grandeur in any view at Nada. There was grandeur in the choice of that name for the poor "ranche" with its grace note of Spanish. |