The Ox Yoke

This spring, my father retrieved an ox yoke from my uncle's widow. He had known about it; I did not. It's in very poor condition: the wood is crumbling, it's surprisingly light for its size, and the holes for the iron parts are almost worn through. Its importance rests in its history, as humble as it may be. The story goes that this yoke was the same used by the earliest Heidgerken family to make their homestead in South Dakota in the 1880s. I know of no way to verify this story other than the oral tradition by which it has passed to my father, now sitting on a pallet of mineral for cattle in our shop.

For me, the yoke invokes questions of travel, nativeness, and home. No Heidgerken I know has ever owned an ox, let alone tilled fields or traveled with them. But we are fascinated by this yoke, we hold on to it as a certification of our Dakotan lineage. It is our birth certificate, the physical proof that we are of this land.

But it also proves that we came from somewhere. Those Heidgerkens, of whose stories I know practically nothing, came westward with their wagons, seeking land, a start fresh, and a place to make a living. What they found was, well, Dakota. Then as today, there is plenty of land, plenty of places to make a new start, and, for a certain definition of "living," one can even make that here. Then as today, people come and people go--myself included. My yoke is a 2001 Toyota Camry, my faithful and trustworthy steed that brings me from school each spring and back again each fall. I've made that westward migration more times than my first Dakotan ancestors would ever have thought possible in one lifetime. And even though I spend most of my year--about 9 months--in another state, I still can't help but think of this place as home. This place is where I am from.

Whatever home is, whatever it means to be from someplace, this blog hopes to chart the place that this perpetual student claims in these ways. I am tied--yokeed--to this place, for better or for worse. This Dakotan yoke, sometimes heavy and sometimes light, prevents me from straying too far, so I find I must hymn its vagaries as best I can.