Drew Lanham (DL): My grandfather began to build the farm in the 1920s… And I think my father saw it as a responsibility to stay on the home place. He didn’t leave the soil. I saw my father in large part through the land and I saw the land as my father’s heart.
He stayed within hollering distance of my grandmother — she could stand on her front porch and she could holler — literally — from across the pasture, across the holler. That’s what I always thought that holler meant (laughs). I didn’t know it was a geographical thing… Going back and forth between my grandparents’ house and my parents’ house, I would stop to investigate whirligig beetles and Bobwhite quail were usually in some thicket somewhere along the way. If it was winter, I was breaking ice on puddles that tadpoles had been in in the spring. It might take me a couple of hours to walk that. It seemed like a thousand miles.
John Lane (JL): How far literally was it?
DL: Less than a quarter of a mile.
JL: (laughs)
DL: Once I left for college, everybody said, ”You’re good at math and science. Be an engineer. Make money, Drew.” And for a while, I tried that, but hated every last moment of it.
Dad was 52 when he died of a heart attack. There were arguments about what would happen on the land, and I can remember coming back home, all of these wonderful forests that I’d grown up in had been clear cut. And losing that land was like losing my father all over again.
I remember leaving that day and driving up this dirt road and stopping where the paved road began, and there’s this bird called a Prairie Warbler that’s singing. This, ”Zee, zee, zee, zee, zee, zee. Zee, zee, zee, zee, zee, zee, zee, zee, zee.” And it was the most hopeful thing for me. I never believed that I should be an engineer. That bird was really sort of my canary in the (laughs) coalmine. I said, ”I can’t do this anymore,” and went back to my apartment.
JL: Dark night of the soul? (laughs)
DL: (laughs) I got a big bowl of Froot Loops and thought about the next steps…
I remember first going out to study these Easten bluebirds — Sialia sialis. And the work was often hot and hard and long hours… But there were these moments when I would look up and there would be flocks of Bobolinks or the songs of Eastern meadowlarks… and taking the moment to realize that I was doing what I had always dreamed. From a very early age I believed that I would be someone who studied birds — who somehow found a way to fly… And so, I would like to think that my father would see my turn towards the study of nature as carrying a legacy forward….
