The next morning I set the paper down on the zoning counter, and the young woman behind the desk read the first paragraph, picked up her phone, and said, you need to come see this, that whole hog permit is dead, because this land is federally protected.
The hog company man in his rubber boots had stood by my mailbox and told me they were putting in six more confinement barns, that my eighty acres were the only thing in the way of their manure lagoon permit, that Id sell or Id smell it every day for the rest of my life.
He did not know what Glen brought home from Des Moines.
Years ago my husband enrolled our eighty acres in a permanent federal conservation program and placed a wetland and grassland easement on the ground along the creek, recorded forever, and that protected land legally blocks the manure lagoon the hog operation needs, because you cannot site a lagoon next to a federally protected wetland.
Glen said good ground ought to be worked, but he also loved the land itself, the creek and the grass and the birds, and he protected the sensitive acres permanently through the federal program, and kept the paperwork with the federal seal in the toolbox under the seat of his old John Deere, the last place anybody would think to look.
The word in capital letters I had to read twice was PERPETUAL. The easement never expires. It binds the land forever. And the setback rules around a protected wetland made the hog companys lagoon permit impossible right where they needed it.
The young woman at the county called the state, and the state confirmed it, and the permit the hog company had already been talking to the county about was dead on the counter.
When the hog man came back at the end of the month, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of the recorded perpetual easement and the federal seal and I said, one way or another, you said. Heres the way. My husband protected this ground forever. Your lagoon cannot go next to a federal wetland easement, and mine runs the length of your permit line. You will not be getting this ground, and you will not be getting that permit.
He looked at that seal a long time and drove off, and the six barns were never built, and the young farmer from church still works my fields, and the air in July is only as bad as it already was, not worse.
We will get that ground one way or another, he had said. He did not. Glen planted the cedars along the west road the year our son was born, and he protected the creek forever, and both still stand, because a farmer who loved his land did the paperwork long before anybody came sniffing after it.